Right to Information Quotes

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

The Liberty of Conscience and of the Press cannot be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified by any authority of the United States

Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition—well, they are still radical ideas.

On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.

A free press is the cornerstone of democracy; there is no question about that.

You can't have a free democracy if you don't have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.

The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.

Why does the White House sometimes seem so determined to close the door on the people's right to know what their government is doing?

I would never let myself knock out a journalist.

I believe a journalist needs to be free to ask the questions he or she deems relevant, without constraints from others.

There is no country on earth with a stronger tradition of protecting the public's right to know.

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.

Any restriction of press freedom is unacceptable.

Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution.

Right to Information is a small concrete step in making our polity more democratic.

… the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day - go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists' job in a free society.

Enshrined in the Philippine constitution, which is similar to the United States, is the bill of rights: freedom of expression, freedom of the press. These are enshrined. And yet, freedom of the press has been curtailed.

The ultimate censorship is the flick of the dial.

T]he Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment.

As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

The people "have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge- I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers."

One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.