David Icke Quotes

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

There are men—now in power in this country—who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression so long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is non-existent, it's startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba's mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

History’s most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with the truth.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.

An attempt to scrutinize men’s thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

Dictators are as scared of books as they are of cannon.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

… to gag us from speaking truth, and discovering the tyrannies of bad men.

Dissidents are despicable parasites

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS.