“What is the point of having free speech if you have nothing to say?”

"Stay Quiet and You'll Be Okay" http://www.steynonline.com/6943/stay-quiet-and-youll-be-okay steynonline.com (9 May 2015)

Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, The Common Good (1998)
Context: Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights.

Jean-Michel Jarre, Edward Snowden - Exit, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNESMafb5ZI
2015

Source: Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), p. 393

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Twelve, "Culture Jamming"

Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)
Context: What has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999, The Common Good (1998)

1 POLITICS AND ISSUES, Free Speech-At A Price, p. 83
Dirty truths (1996), first edition

Source: To Bill O'Reilly, in discussion about the supposed War on Christmas, as quoted in "In Letterman appearance, O'Reilly repeated false claim that school changed 'Silent Night' lyrics" http://mediamatters.org/items/200601040009, Media Matters for America, (4 January 2006).