Freedom of Religion And Expression
The constitutional freedom of religion is the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
No power over the freedom of religion [is] delegated to the United States by the Constitution.
We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.
Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so profoundly meditated upon as the Bible.
The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded.
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
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.
By Benjamin Franklin
I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. 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.
In Iran, there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary, no free elections. There is no freedom of religion - not even for Shiites, who are forced by Irans theocracy to adhere to one narrow set of official rules.
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
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?
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
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.
