Suppression of Free Speech Quotes

We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions.

Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela. The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed by arresting and jailing any who continue speaking against the regime.

Some Muslims try to impose their religious taboos in the public domain. That is not asking for my respect, it’s asking for my submission.

For the Left, tolerance does not mean tolerance. It means first, acceptance. And second, celebration. That is totalitarianism: You not only have to live with what you may differ with, dear citizen, you have to celebrate it or pay a steep price.

The tendency of all strong governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation.

It is the people who scream the loudest about America and Freedom who see to be the most intolerant for a differing point of view.

A real totalitarianism is at work in the world and wants to impose its views not only on Arab Muslims, but on the West. The same way that they veil women, Islamic radicals want to veil cartoons in the press.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

The hard left labels anyone who challenges it 'divisive.' The leftists live in a world where everyone is free to look different but must think the same. I don't play their game. I threaten them and their narrative. That's why they slap the 'divisive' label and attempt to dismiss me. It's not going to work - not on me.

Unfortunately the situation of human rights in Iran isn't improving. Some of the newspapers were shut down and the government didn't try to reopen the newspapers that were shut down before. And the laws are as bad as before.

Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?

When a government is in fear of dissent from its own citizens, and when its reaction is to shut out that dissent, we should all worry.

I often get attacked in Saudi Arabia, but the critics don't ridicule my ideas. There were about 30 or 40 articles attacking me in the Saudi press. Not a single one debated something I wrote. They just ridiculed me as a person. They see me as a traitor who is writing in the foreign press. But discuss what I am writing? They will not.

And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.

There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.

When I was young, there was only one TV channel, sponsored by the government, and it only broadcast things like what the leader had for breakfast. There was no real media.

In Pakistan, ideology actually forbids intellectual activity. For instance, there is one section in the penal code which says that if you criticize the ideology of Pakistan, you can be punished for it.

If I said what I was really thinking about this f**ked up world, the government would assassinate me like all the other people they've killed.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?

The Government, … always quenches in blood any democratic manifestation

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

Only 7 percent of the of Republican professors believed that there was serious discrimination on campus against people with right-wing views.

The very concept of an Iranian university is an oxymoron. There are no free and open places of learning in that repressive theocracy. Dissenters are not given tenure; they are murdered, after first being tortured. Blasphemy, which is broadly defined, is punished. Gays are not only excluded from Iranian universities, but are imprisoned and killed.