“Think of "free speech", not "free beer".”

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Richard Stallman 130
American software freedom activist, short story writer and … 1953

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“The explanation for "free software" is simple — a person who has grasped the idea of "free speech, not free beer" will not get it wrong again.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

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“There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

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

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“There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

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“There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can't stand.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence

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“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: "Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

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“Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.”

Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891) British freethinker, and radical politician

Speech at Hall of Science c.1880 quoted in An Autobiography of Annie Besant; reported in Edmund Fuller, Thesaurus of Quotations (1941), p. 398; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
Attributed

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“The remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech.”

Cyber Rights — cited in [DeCandido, GraceAnne A., Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, Booklist, American Library Association, 94, 22, 1932, August 1998]
Cyber Rights

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“The real hate speech is not allowing free speech.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Tweet https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/787257675952324608 (15 October 2016)
2010s

“There are no protections of autonomy and free speech.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: Liberals placed an unreasonable amount of faith in large institutions: unions, foundations, big government, large corporations, and universities. These institutions are based on principles that are antithetical to democracy. They are not democratic, they are hierarchical: Someone is at the top and everybody else is at the bottom. Their policies are not made democratically, they are made at the top. These institutions are also not egalitarian. They operate by administrative discretion and authority, not the rule of law: There is no legislature, no group lawmaking body.
The individual in the large organization does not have the kind of constitutional rights that an individual in the society at large has. There are no protections of autonomy and free speech. Employees can be fired for many reasons. We need to constitutionalize large organizations to protect the people within them, to ensure that they can be politically outspoken.

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