Top 10 Floyd Abrams Quotes at QuotationFun

Displaying Top 10 Floyd Abrams quotes

All Floyd Abrams Quotes

Our Biography page will tell you more about Floyd Abrams

In August 1967 I spent a few days in New Delhi, visiting a friend who had been a law school classmate seven years earlier. She was a princess - a genuine one, from a still-powerful regal family. In New York, when we were studying together, I had taken her to a Yankee game. In New Delhi she reciprocated by taking me to her fortune-teller - not just hers, but that of a bevy of Indian leaders, including former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter and successor as prime minister, Indira Gandhi.... Before I was thirty-five, he said, I would go to my country's capital to work on something that was important. The work, he said, would make me famous. It was not the sort of prediction that one entirely forgets. I was then thirty-one.

Family, Politics, Power, Success, Patriotism, Legal

Share

CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.

Age, Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

My role in it was not as central as it was in some of the later cases considering I was younger then and I was playing a role of co-counsel on the case.

Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

When I began we did not really have a lot of First Amendment law. It is really surprising to think of it this way, but a lot of the law - most of the law that relates to the First Amendment freedom of the press in America - is really within living memory.

Freedom, Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

It's not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.

Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

Were this not Texas, were there not a state where there were no protections at all and where the law was clear on that, I think CBS and Mary Mapes and Dan Rather and all of us had a very good chance of winning. So this is an ongoing battle about an issue of principle.

Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

I then described two of my favorite First Amendment cases, the first of which was the 1966 Supreme Court ruling in Mills v. Alabama.... The other case was commenced by a Miami labor leader, Pat Tornillo, who was a candidate for the Florida House of Representatives. The Miami Herald had published editorials criticizing Tornillo; the union leader had responded by demanding that the Herald publish, verbatim, replies he had written to each editorial.

Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

No other country in the world gives protection like that, but it is not absolute protection. People sometimes meet that high burden and win libel suits, and in those cases I think they ought to win.

Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

So sometimes the facts are good and sometimes the facts are bad, the important thing from the point of view of a principle as broad and important as freedom of speech is that the courts articulate and set forth in a very protective way what those principles are.

Freedom, Politics, Patriotism, Legal

Share

Like or Follow us

Popular Authors

▪ Manzar Ayubi
▪ Vera Lynn
▪ Jean Smith
▪ Nawaz Sharif
▪ Imran Khan
▪ Tariq Aziz
▪ Sabiha Khanum
▪ Sushant Rajput
▪ Wes Unseld