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.

"First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."

[Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (00-795), 198 F.3d 1083, affirmed.]

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

If tyranny is going to come in the United States, it's going to come from people who are so fearful of the liberty of Americans, that they believe that the government should shut down all sorts of freedoms that we hold dear.

If one were to rob human beings of the power to do and say what they please, that would be to take away, and to curtail the first principle of independence.

To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.

Put simply, suppression of free speech is a symptom of tyranny.

Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.

"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."

[The One Un-American Act, Speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award (December 3, 1952)]

If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Looking around and sizing the situation, it seems to me that the real danger before our country is the crushing down of individual freedom and initiative by the steamroller of government authority. Already we see indications of this in the . . . legislative measures having an expropriatory [sic] character and the passage of taxation and other bills calculated to kill private enterprise in the field of industrial development . . . Democracy without freedom for the individual is a sham and a delusion.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.