Donna Shalala Quotes

The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas. Thus it permits the freest expression of views before students, trusting to their good sense in passing judgment on these views. Only in this way can it best serve American democracy.

Liberals shouldn't cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what's liberalism about?

The goal of higher education should be to champion the airing of all honest viewpoints. Nothing less is acceptable.

Academic freedom and free speech mean the right to consider ideas with which you might disagree.

When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen.

Some of the speakers we bring on campus may not reflect official church teaching, but that's how it is.

Brown’s core value of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas is bedrock to our capacity to fulfill our mission as a university. This value applies not only when ideas are agreeable and aligned with our own. Protecting the right to free expression and promoting open discourse is even more essential when ideas are divergent, abhorrent or even hurtful.

All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of thought and expression. That is all. I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true. I do not pretend to tell all the truth..

Men must also be allowed the publication of their opinions, if this be done with decency and seriousness, for the learned can have no right to say that they are in possession of the truth, still less can the unlearned, unless every grave man can offer his opinions, be they what they may…

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

A university is supposed to be a place where all ideas are discussed.

That process of exposure to diverse opinions isn't 'brainwashing' - it's education.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

There is nothing wrong with intellectual differences flowing from freedom of thought as long as such differences remain confined to intellectual debates.

I believe in freedom of speech, but I believe we should also have the right to comment on freedom of speech.

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

A university is not a political party, and an education is not an indoctrination.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

No errors of opinion can possibly be dangerous in a country where opinion is left free to grapple with them.

Of course there are always exceptions, but opinions are not to be feared.

Maybe politically it wasn't wise but when people have different view points I think the public has a right to hear it and the public has a right to make decisions based on those view points.

Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure.

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who'll argue with you.