“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

“The NARROW-MINDED BIGOTS have given to this country and to the world freedom of speech, freedom of thought and action and religious liberty.”

“Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom - and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.”

“Liberty of the press, liberty of speech, freedom of religion, or rather freedom from religion, and the unlimited right of private judgement have borne no good fruit, and many bad ones.”

“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”

“We hear everywhere about this false trade-off between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as though there were some kind of balance to be struck here. There is no balance to be struck. Freedom of speech never infringes on freedom of religion. There is nothing I can say in this podcast about religion in general, or about Islam in particular, that would infringe upon someone else's freedom to practice his or her religion. If your freedom of religion entails that you force those who do not share it to conform to it, well that's not freedom of religion. We have a word for that – that's theocracy. This respect that we are all urged to show for "religious sensitivity" is actually a demand that the blasphemy laws of Islam be followed by non-muslims.”

“It is absolutely clear to everyone that the reasons for such a disastrous war as we have endured for seven years now have nothing to do with the demand for democracy or freedom. They have much more to do with a dirty game of world economics.”

“It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually.
Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.”

“All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love.”