"The constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is." -Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
"The First Amendment protects all ideas, including Frank Collin's ideas, because that protection is the life, the essential element, of democracy itself." -David Hamlin
"Once the Court embarked on enforcing the First Amendment as law, it faced a new task: defining from case to case what the words of the amendment mean. That may sound simple. What would be more direct than the command, 'Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press'? But in fact, giving concrete meaning to those words was a daunting, and endless, job." -Anthony Lewis
The History of the First Amendment
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“Only a few years after the adoption of the First Amendment in 1791, Fedralists threw newspaper editors into jail for critisicing the government. Defenders of slavery killed the abolitionists editor Elija Lovejoy and banned members of Congress from raising the issue of slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives. A northern critic of the Civil War was sentenced to two years in prison for making a speech that might ‘demoralize the troops.’
"But censorship was not widely seen as a problem until World War I. It was then that the rapidly expanding federal government crushed criticism of the war, convicting more than a thousand of making statements that allegedly harmed the war effort. Immediately following the war, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched nationwide raids that rounded up thousands of suspected communists who were guilty of nothing more than belonging to the wrong political party."
Library of Congress
The civil liberties movement in this country was born in the outrage over the abuses commited during World War I and the Red Scare. In the beginning, the fight for free speech was waged by a handful of men and women who believed that the greatest threat to American government came not from radicals calling for its overthrow, but from patriotic officials intent on suppressing ‘dangerous’ beliefs.” -Christopher M. Finan
The Exceptional First Amendment
Library of Congress
One of the things that make America different from other countries is the First Amendment. No other country allows as much hate speech as we do. In Canada, some of the criticizing words that we say about our government could put us on trial. In fact, we allow so much hate speech that some people believe we should rethink the meaning of the First Amendment. However, many people believe that debate is more effective than banning hate speech. "Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France." -Adam Liptak