Milton's Areopagitica

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Free speech and dragon's teeth

Goering: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars. Goering: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. G M Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, p 278 Entry for April 18th. Da Capo Press 1995,

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Scheneck v USA 1919

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a viol the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. … John Milton, Areopagitica p4 (Noel Douglas reprint)

Choose your battles

Little minds try to defend everything at once, but sensible people look at the main point only; they parry the worst blows and stand a little hurt if thereby they avoid a greater one. If you try to hold everything, you hold nothing.

Frederick the Great

Censorship and existential threats

"There are usually two motives behind any censorship- good and bad. The good motive is the desire of the authorities to safeguard and strengthen the community, particular in times of stress. The bad motive is the desire of the authorities to suppress criticism, particular of themselves. Both these motives existed in 1644, as they do in 1944. ... The fact is we are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot forsee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. Yet the past was once the present, the seventeenth century was once “now”, with an unknown future, and Milton , who lived in his ‘now’ as we do in ours, believed in taking risks.”

E M Forster, "Two cheers for democracy"

The first restriction on political speech?

From henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish any false News or Tales, whereby discord pr occasion of discord or slander  may grow between the King and his People or  the Great Men of the Realm.

3 Edward I , c 34 (1275)

But then again, there's Leviticus 19.16

Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer amongst the people.

Williams on the limits of evolutionary psychology.

The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by Homo sapiens, the massive development of non-genetic learning.

Bernard Williams, Truth and truthfulness, p 28

Force or argument?

The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse,

For Tories own no argument but force:

With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent,

For Whigs admit no force but argument

Sir William Brown, Nichols literary anecdotes ,ii,  330

In Schauer, Free Speech, a philosophical enquiry,  78, n8

Thriving earthworms

"Those great men Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, the most consummate in politics, who founded states, or instructed princes, or wrote most accurately on public government, were at the same time the most acute at all abstracted and sublime speculations; the clearest light being ever necessary to guide the most important actions. And, whatever the world may say, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman."

Bishop Berkley.

On the other hand, Shakespeare:

Glad that you thus continue your resolve
To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy.
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no Stoics nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd.
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have,
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you.
(Barnes' introduction to the Penguin Nichomachean Ethics).