This is the latest post in my quotes collection series. You can check out the full collection here.
Everyone believes in free speech - until someone says something they don’t like. Then come the exceptions. This view’s too dangerous; that one’s too hateful; this other one’s so obviously wrong that it doesn’t even deserve a hearing.
We all like to think we’d draw the line in exactly the right place. But so did everyone throughout history who wanted ideas suppressed, books banned, and dissenters silenced.
The quotes below offer 12 reasons to distrust our censorious impulses. They remind us that silencing others can rob us of the chance to discover we’re wrong; that bad ideas are easier to defeat when people are free to air them; and that rewarding outrage and threats is an excellent way to get more of both. They also pose a question that all would-be censors need to ask themselves: Who would you trust to decide what ideas you’re allowed to hear?
“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”
-Noam Chomsky
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
-Frederick Douglass
“If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error… He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
-John Stuart Mill
“To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
-John Stuart Mill
“The Newtonian principle of gravitation is now more firmly established on the basis of reason, than it would be were the government to step in and to make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“These days, few things have been more useful in the fight for same-sex marriage than how feeble the arguments against it are. Surely this is more constructive than people in favor of same-sex marriage indignantly waving away all opposition as too immoral to be worth consideration.”
-John McWhorter
“If there are still people crazy enough to deny that the Holocaust occurred, will they be persuaded by imprisoning people who express that view? On the contrary, they will be more likely to think that people are being imprisoned for expressing views [that] cannot be refuted by evidence and argument alone.”
-Peter Singer
“What does society gain from such quarantining? A coerced but false silence that, if anything at all, plays into the hands of the paranoid and dangerous who already believe that there is a global conspiracy to shut them up. Forcing hate speech underground by banning it is like taking Xanax for syphilis. You may briefly feel better about your horrible disease, but your sickness will only get worse.”
-Greg Lukianoff
“The problem with granting heckler’s vetoes over speech is that it incentivizes threats of disruption or violence from the least tolerant members of our society. As the Supreme Court astutely observed, it is perverse to protect speech in general but then refuse to protect that speech which is ‘unpopular with bottle throwers.’ In doing so, you pretty much guarantee that there will be a lot more bottles to be thrown. After all, they know it works!”
-Greg Lukianoff
“Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.”
-Jonathan Rauch
“If we have a right not to be offended, then we have no right to give offense. That means we have no reliable, predictable right to speak, because in diverse societies there are no opinions or beliefs that are universally inoffensive. If we have a legal right to feel emotionally safe and un-offended, we have a legal obligation to keep silent, which we violate at our peril.”
-Wendy Kaminer
“To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?”
-Christopher Hitchens
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The Book Cordelia Fine Reviewed Isn’t the Book I Wrote: My Response to Her Review of A Billion Years of Sex Differences
Quick-Fire Responses to 14 Woke Arguments
Why I Am Not a Freudian
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Steve Stewart-Williams
When I tried to get to the core, or truth, on the free speech question, I ultimately stumbled on Stanley Fish and his “There's no such thing as free speech (and it's a good thing too)”. Not sure if you are familiar with it, but I felt he was right.
Every society needs to defend itself against harmful speech, and history isn't exactly showing us otherwise.
Voltaire wrote in his book (On Tolerance?) in the 1770s that the atrocities of the past surely would never be repeated. Wrong, of course.
Mill, writing in the 1850s, likewise probably felt secure that there would not be communist or fascist revolutions.
Free speech sounds great, in theory. But where do we find it?
Good stuff Dr. SSW. I love free speech because we get to see out in the open who the idiots are.