Marketplace of Ideas Quotes

Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want. You can’t impose tolerance top-down.

The media, famously called the marketplace of ideas, is a failed market when a strong interest faces no like interest to generate competing ideas.

In times of social turmoil, our impulse is often to pull back on free expression. We want the progress that comes from free expression, but not the tension.

The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

A key part of our democracy is having a marketplace of ideas, open forums where people with diverse viewpoints can be heard and treated with respect.

When politicians seek to restrict political speech, it is invariably to protect their own incumbency and avoid having to defend their policies in the marketplace of ideas.

While I worry about an erosion of truth, I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Increasingly, we’re seeing people try to define more speech as dangerous because it may lead to political outcomes they see as unacceptable. Some hold the view that since the stakes are so high, they can no longer trust their fellow citizens with the power to communicate and decide what to believe for themselves.

Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.

Often, the people who call the most for us to remove content are often the first to complain when it’s their content that falls on the wrong side of a policy.

The victories of the New Deal didn't happen just because suddenly everybody understood the brutalities of laissez-faire. This was a time, let's remember, of tremendous ideological ferment, when many different ideas about how to organize societies did battle with one another in the public square. A time when humanity dared to dream big about different kinds of futures, many of them organized along radically egalitarian lines. Now, not all of these ideas were good but this was an era of explosive imagining. This meant that the movements demanding change knew what they were against -- crushing poverty, widening inequality -- but just as important, they knew what they were for. They had their "no" and they had their "yes," too. They also had very different models of political organization than we do today.

We have to defeat them on the battlefield and in the marketplace of ideals. And PBS, I believe, owed the nation the chance to hear the moderate Muslim voices who decry terrorism and Jihadism, and they didn't give them that chance, and that's a terrible thing.

Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice.

It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.

The most repressive societies have always restricted speech the most — and when people are finally able to speak, they often call for change.

The country needs more than one-party dominance, as much as I believe the Democratic Party is the party for the middle class... We need to have a marketplace of ideas.

If thought were left perfectly free from ban of legislative or ecclesiastical censor, the best thoughts would as naturally prevail over the worst as the best seeds of the forest naturally triumph over the worst seeds.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Every story has a point of view and whether it's by what one chooses to include or exclude from a story or whether it's a very specific agenda that is pushed, there is no such thing as objective media. Once you realize that it's more than just a marketplace of ideas, it's a battleground of ideas that are suppressed and the ideas that are pushed forward in the mainstream media are the ones that independent media has a chance to address. I think that the democratization of media in that way can be very helpful in allowing the truth to come out in a way that it might not on CNN or FOX.

In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading, or a political smear.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

In times of social tension we pull back on expression, and we always end up believing that it was the wrong thing to do.