Free Speech
Despite her acrimonious history with Holocaust denier David Irving, she has stated that she is personally opposed to the three-year prison sentence of Irving in Austria for two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz, as minimizing the atrocities of the Third Reich is a crime punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment in Austria. "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens...Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime. I am a free speech person, I am against censorship."
Read more about this topic: Deborah Lipstadt
Famous quotes containing the words free speech, free and/or speech:
“Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.”
—Greil Marcus (b. 1945)
“It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function of people’s “thinking” and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)