Sean O'Casey Quotes

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

Does the District Attorney believe ... that the gallows or guillotine ever settled an idea? If an idea can live, it lives because history adjudges it right. I ask only for justice …. The scaffold has never yet and never will destroy an idea or a movement. …Whatever my social views are, they are what they are. They cannot be tried in this courtroom.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

This generation is frightened of ideas, or at least it's being suppressed.

Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.

Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.

By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.

Cease all interference in the religion, society, politics, and governance of the Muslims world. And leave us alone to establish the Islamic shura state, which will unite the Muslims of Earth in truth and justice …. Put an end to all forms of interference in the education curricula and information media of the Islamic world, and impose a blanket ban on all broadcasts to our region, especially those designed to alter or destroy the faith, minds, morals, and values, of our people.

The media, famously called the marketplace of ideas, is a failed market when a strong interest faces no like interest to generate competing ideas.

He who sincerely expressed his thought must remain alone, whereas it generally happens that everyone else, or the majority at least, have been thinking and feeling the same things but without expressing them. he who sincerely expressed his thought must remain alone, whereas it generally happens that everyone else, or the majority at least, have been thinking and feeling the same things but without expressing them.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks

I require no bayonets to defend the liberty of my thoughts.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Those who won our independence had confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning and communication of ideas to discover and spread political and economic truth

Where States impose unlawful censorship through filtering and other technologies, the use of encryption and anonymity may empower individuals to circumvent barriers and access information and ideas without the intrusion of authorities. Journalists, researchers, lawyers and civil society rely on encryption and anonymity to shield themselves (and their sources, clients and partners) from surveillance and harassment. The ability to search the web, develop ideas and communicate securely may be the only way in which many can explore basic aspects of identity, such as one’s gender, religion, ethnicity, national origin or sexuality.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

You cannot imprison an idea. You have to fight it with a better idea.

The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Intellectual freedom is essential -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.