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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous

It is times like this that have me reaching for Voltaire, the great thinker and enlightened monarchist (he "would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of his own species".) of his time. The continued relentless attack on free speech as it relates to those silly harmless cartoons is certainly affirming Voltaire's one prayer in life: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it."

Time to get back to the basics. A quote used to illustrate Voltaire's views on freedom of speech, which was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 biography on Voltaire, goes: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", pretty much sums up what I believe on the matter. Some others do the trick too:

"In a free state, tongues too should be free." Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516).

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

"The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate." US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in United States v. Schwimmer (1929).

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992).

"...if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility." John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).

"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish." Robert H. Jackson

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