Enjoyable as always, quotations about the First Amendment and journalism:

“Secrecy is one of the handiest tools for government that wants to be accountable only to itself regardless of the spirit of any law.” — Tom Curley, president, CEO, The Associated Press, 2008

“Once you attempt legislation on religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.” — William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, 1937

“Better incur the trouble of testing and exploring a thousand fallacies than by rejecting stifle a single beneficent truth.” — Horace Greeley, editor, New York Tribune, 1845

“I’ve found that people are now deluged with information. In my day I had the feeling I was telling people something they wouldn’t otherwise know. That’s no longer true. I’m glad I’m not 20 years younger, because I’d be very discouraged.” — Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst, National Public Radio, 2008

“I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel’s imagination.” — W.A. Criswell, pastor, First Baptist Chaurch, Dallas, 1984

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — Harry S. Truman, 33rd U.S. president, 1950

“More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses our civic alarm systems.” — Paul Starr, communications professor, Princeton University, 2009

— Quotes from First Amendment Calendar, produced by the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, 2010