Get Inspired
Hear from some of our world's greatest free speech & anti-censorship leaders
Embedded Files
“Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.”
— Judy Blume, American writer
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Photo credit: Horn Book Magazine
“Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain.”
— Mildred Taylor, American children's writer
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
— Noam Chomsky, American professor and public intellectual
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Photo credit: New York Law School
“It is precisely those who lack political or economic power who are the most dependent on robust freedom of speech.”
— Nadine Strossen, Former ACLU President
“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
— Mark Twain, American writer and humorist
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Photo Credit: African American Literature Book Club
“Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created.”
— Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, Scholar of multicultural children’s literature
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
— George Orwell, Author of 1984
Photo credit: National Endowment for the Humanities
Photo credit: Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
— Salman Rushdie, Indian-British novelist
“First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”
— Anthony M. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice
Photo credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta | AP
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