Freedom of the Press
Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
Columbia Lake
Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
Thomas Jefferson
Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Harry S. Truman
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
Mark Twain
The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
Mark Twain
The first thing dictators do is finish free press, to establish censorship. There is no doubt that a free press is the first enemy of dictatorship.
Fidel Castro