Ernest Istook Quotes

Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views, even views that we profoundly disagree with. We do not do so because we support hateful speech, but because our founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views and practice their own faith may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.

Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression.

The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.

The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.

The courts are using the First Amendment to attack religion, when they should be using it to protect religion.

We are the only country that allows and protects hate speech.

Few things are as sacred and as fundamental to Oklahomans as the constitutional rights of free speech and the free exercise of religion.

There are lots of different ideas, lots of different opinions about the First Amendment Defense Act and what it should be. There were a lot of different forms of it while I was on the Hill. But I would say that I agree that the decision on gay marriage does mean that we need to take some steps to defend religious liberty.

Our freedoms are shared freedoms: they are bound up in each other. The ability to confront oppression in the guise of religion is linked to our ability to worship as we choose: both are acts of expression.

Nowhere does our Constitution say we cannot say something about another's religion. Nowhere does our Constitution say we cannot say anything that offends someone.

The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.

The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.

Think 'free speech,' not 'free beer.'

I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

It is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man.

In America-as elsewhere-free speech is confined to the dead.

Freedom of speech is a great thing and we have said nothing that is not allowed.

Our legal and political culture has created a bias in the law that borders on censorship against reading, displaying, or quoting the Bible.

I would bet there is no place in the United States where the First Amendment would survive intact.

The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

Free speech not only lives, it rocks!

A law imposing criminal penalties on protected speech is a stark example of speech suppression.

I'm really proud of this Supreme Court and the way they've been dealing with the issue of First Amendment political speech.