Free Exchange of Ideas Quotes
Hall wrote the above in The Friends of Voltaire as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. This quotation – which is sometimes misattributed to Voltaire himself – is often cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech. Hall wrote under a man’s name so that her work would be taken more seriously which it was.
In recent years, presidents of both parties have refused to allow Congress in its oversight responsibility to question certain assistants or see certain documents that are not technically national secrets. The questionable legal principle, executive privilege, supposedly assures that the President can get honest confidential advice without the advice giver feeing intimidated that the advice will become public. However, Presidents have also used this principle to cover-up scandals, wrong doing, and incompetence. Since the President simply asserts the “privilege” there is no way of checking in any particular case to determine if it is an abuse or not.
Many Turks deny that there was a genocide and claim that the Armenians were conspiring with the Turkish Russian enemies. In order to stop the public discussion of the subject, they went to a local court and got a judge to rule that they could not use a public university for such a controversial subject. The Prime Minister and other Turkish leaders were outraged. Quickly a private university offered to provide the facility for the event with the original participants still involved. However Erdogan has had two political faces in his career—one as a moderate reformer where freedom of speech was values, and the other as the head of an Islamic political party where Islamic law makes some kinds of speech a capital crime (Heresy and blasphemy).
The George W. Bush administration was a very ideological one as opposed to pragmatic. They would not tolerate public officials who would say anything that might undermine an administrative ideological position. In particular, they did not want government scientists releasing any data or information that was not totally consistent with their ideology and program. They introduced a new policy within the government whereby no one could talk to a reporter or make a public speech or deliver a professional paper without first getting approval of administration “public affairs” agents first. Government scientists and other officials had never before been censored like this. Important scientific studies were not made public where they might not support the administration ideological positions. Hanson spoke out against the policy at great embarrassment to the administration. See {614691}.
