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"Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

 

Salman Rushdie

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Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.

 

Charles Bradlaugh

 

The explanation for "free software" is simple--a person who has grasped the idea of "free speech, not free beer" will not get it wrong again.

 

Richard M. Stallman

 

As for drugs, my impression is that their effect was almost completely negative, simply removing people from meaningful struggle and engagement. Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before -- if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period." If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice.

 

Noam Chomsky

 

What has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a necessary evil," and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

 

Voltairine de Cleyre

 

Unfortunately, the "games aren't speech" comments attributed to me at the Delaware House Judiciary Committee hearing were not fully reported. I went on to note that the controller's use as a data input device as well as the means by which the Dual Shock controller gives biofeedback renders the entire mechanism a device, which of course it is.
It is this argument that carried the day at our November 3 hearing in Alabama on the First Amendment, which I alone argued, against the mighty and unethical Blank Rome, and we won the hearing on my argument. So, kids, you can fuss and fume all you want, and the guy who showed up in a T-shirt at the hearing can be as upset as he wants, but nobody but an extremist ideologue thinks that mature-rated games whose "M" label is an admission of the harm to minors of the games thinks that a video game is "political speech" under any sane reading of the First Amendment.
If you all don't know what "political speech" is, then you need to review some court cases on the subject. As to whether games are speech of any kind, please note that "speech" doesn't cause hand injuries which are warned of on the Dual Shock Controller.
A video game isn't any more "speech" than a gun is. Both are devices.
And for all of you who think that the First Amendment protects everything, tell Dennis McCauley to stop acting like a child and preventing me from posting here through Live Journal. You all have missed a ton of bad news for the video game industry simply because Dennis McCauley can't, as a journalist wannabe, handle the truth.
Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson