Some campaigns are not worth waging if you can't win; others have to be fought on grounds of principle regardless of the chances for success.
Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sword the world affords.
It is always easy to take a position when society agrees with you. It is hard to take a position that everyone else in society disagrees with.
I lose film roles because I'm a person who doesn't keep quiet about certain things. But if my heart tells me something is wrong, I'm going to go and do something about it.
When you stand your ground, and you are attacked by liberals and attacked by the press, that is going to earn you the respect of voters.
I hate the Communists and have for many years and don't feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.
I'm willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas.
We have got to defeat this attack on the freedom of the mind...But it takes courage for a young man with a family to stand up to it; all the more obligation on those of us who have nothing left to lose. At any age it is better to be a dead lion than a living dog - though better still, of course, to be a living and victorious lion - but it is easier to run the risk of being killed (or fired) in action if before long you are going to be dead anyway. This freedom seems to me the chief consolation of old age.
As Christians, it's our duty to stand up for what we believe - that's called testifying.
Not everything needs changing. Some things need protecting. And that can be just as important, challenging and rewarding as changing the world.
I do have a mouth - I will say. I speak up when I see things I don't care for.
But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
Deep patriots don't just sing the song, 'America the Beautiful' and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty -- from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots don't just visit the Statue of Liberty and send a postcard home to grandma. We defend the principles upon which that great monument was founded -- 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'
People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.
As a personality, I'm fighter, you know. And I don't give up, and if I believe I'm correct, I'm right, then I work, and I fight. Okay, this could be over a chess board, this could be in life, and so I defend my principles.
I respect anyone who has to fight and howl for his decency.
I don't fight for much, but when I fight for something, it's usually because I think I'm going to be right.
There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues, the populists, the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.
We will not hesitate to speak out when we see actions that contradict those values.
There are a lot of westerns that deal with people standing up for their principles, and that is the predominant theme that has been in my films.
