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If you believe ...      SpeakUp 101 --      Mardi'Crass
                             
 
 
                 
 
 
 
 
 
 
       Gore Vidal  
 
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
  
    D. H. Lawrence
                       (1885-1938)
 
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.
 
    Alan K. Simpson
          (Senator, R-CO, 1979-97)
 
There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.
 
 
    Frederick Douglass
 
Power concedes nothing without a demand... Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
 
       Victor Ferkiss
                 (Technological Man:
     The Myth and the Reality, 1969)
 
Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine.
 
                   
   Henry Grady Weaver
 
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own.
 
                     
   Thomas Paine
                (Founding Father)
 
Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
 
        
 Marcus Tullius Cicero
                        (106-43 B.C.)
 
Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.
        
     Mortimer Adler
 
Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
        
      Ramsey Clark
   (U.S. Attorney General, 1967-69)
 
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
              
Henry Steele Commager
 
Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.
        
     Angelica Grimke
        (Anti-Slavery Examiner, 1836)
 
The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among [constitutional minded] Republicans and [morally sensitive] Christians.
      
Henry Steele Commager
 
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
        
      Stg. Ruthers
 
Ideas are bulletproof and that's why tyrants identify, vilify and nullify their conception preemptively with restrictions on speech.
        
   William O. Douglas
 (Supreme Court Justice, 1939-75)
 
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us all.
         
       Hugo L. Black
        (U.S. Supreme Court Justice,
       Lathrop v. Donohue, 1961)
 
I can think of few plainer, more direct abridgments of the freedoms of the First Amendment than to compel persons to support candidates, parties, ideologies or causes that they are against.
            
     Potter Stewart
        (U.S. Supreme Court Justice,
       Walker v. Birmingham, 1967)
 
The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face.
        
 Robert H. Jackson
     (U.S. Supreme Court Justice,
West Virginia Board of Education
              vs. Barnette, 1943)
 
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections.
        
   Samuel Gompers
   (70 Years of Life & Labor, 1925)
 
The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.
        
       William Blackstone
 
Every freeman has the undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this is to destroy the freedom of the press.
        
    Henry J. Hyde
      (Congress, R-IL, 1975-2007)
 
Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.
        
    Noam Chomsky
           (Leftist Political Activist) 
 
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
        
     George Orwell
                   (Author of ‘1984’)
 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
        
        E. M. Forster
(Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951) 
 
We are willing enough to praise freedom when it is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
        
     Granville Hicks
 
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
        
 A. Whitney Griswold
             (NY Times, Feb. 24, 1959)
 
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom.
        
   Heinrich Heine
    (Almansor: A Tragedy, 1823)
 
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
         
 The Friends of Voltaire
                                (1906)
 
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
        
        Janet Frame
          (Faces In The Water, 1982)
 
"For your own good" is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
 
       John Morley
               (Critical Miscellanies) 
 
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
                 
   Abraham Lincoln
     (1st Inaugural Address, 1861)
 
If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution.
 
 
     Patrick Henry
                  (Founding Father)
 
Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me: give me liberty or give me death.
 
      
        Nathan Hale
                  (Founding Father)
 
I only regret that I have but one life to give my country.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  Got Rights?
 
   Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. 
       When it dies there, no constitution, no law,
       no court can save it. 
      
    - Learned Hand
     (U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, 1924-to-1961)
 
 
Rights: Our Stimulus Package
Rights are like muscles; only exercise brings them to full strength and only full strength can bring awareness, attraction and achievement.
 
I’m flexing my human right of free speech, protected by the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to reassure you free speech still exists, to awe your senses and emotions, with inspiration, and ultimately to get you to take action. 
 
Mardi'Crass of Free Speech: