Anthony Kennedy Quotes

The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.

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.

I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.

I shall stand for freedom of thought and expression in a place where it has been trampled and penalized.

I find it very offensive when the government tells me what I can and cannot watch. Censor yourself.

Aesthetic freedom is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech.

Everyone has the right to express his thoughts, to express himself as he wants.

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.

Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power…

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Liberty of thought means liberty to communicate one's thought.

the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do.

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

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

We need to defend absolutely the freedom of speech.

In America we can say what we think, and even if we can't think, we can say it anyhow.

I live in America. I have the right to write whatever I want. And it's equaled by another right just as powerful: the right not to read it. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend people.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

The right of conscience and private judgment is unalienable, and it is truly the interest of all mankind to unite themselves into one body for the liberty, free exercise, and unmolested enjoyment of this right.

The greatest single blessing enjoyed by the people of these United States is the right of conscience -- the right to think, and to say and write what one thinks. I admit of no limitation of that right.

In a free state every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks.

Freedom of the press and of religious opinion should be inviolate.

Censorship is the conscience of society.