Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [181-200] of 288 Press quotesPress QuotesPress Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.~ A. J. Liebling The First Amendment issue here is, as the parties frame it, fairly narrow: is there a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public? Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative.~ Judge Kermit Victor Lipez A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society.~ Walter Lippmann While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.~ Walter Lippmann Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution…in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.~ Rosa Luxemburg Civil libertarians must often remind government officials (and others) that if the First Amendment only protected the expression of popular and agreeable ideas, it would be totally unnecessary since those ideas would never be threatened by our democratic form of government. Our society's commitment to free speech is tested when we encounter the expression of ideas that are disagreeable -- or even offensive.~ Timothy Lynch One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.~ General Douglas MacArthur May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this ought not to produce great and universal alarm? Whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights? And whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigor, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it? ~ James Madison The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.~ James Madison A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a republic, and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace.~ James Madison The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon … has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.~ James Madison It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.~ Thomas Mann If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.~ Justice Thurgood Marshall The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.~ George Mason The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state; it ought not, therefore, to be restricted in this commonwealth.~ Massachusetts Declaration of Rights The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers … is absurd.~ Robert McChesney If, as it appears, the experiment that was called 'America' is at an end ... then perhaps a fitting epitaph would be ... 'here lies America the greatest nation that might have been had it not been for the Edomite bankers who first stole their money, used their stolen money to buy their politicians and press and lastly deprived them of their constitutional freedom by the most evil device yet created --- The Federal Reserve Banking System.'~ G. D. McDaniel I’m going to introduce a resolution to have the postmaster general stop reading dirty books and deliver the mail.~ Gail W. McGee In May 1998, [Los Angeles Times publisher Mark] Willis told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted to make the Times more appealing to women and minorities by producing stories that were “more emotional, more personal and less analytic.”~ William McGowan If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.~ Herman Melville Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print