Free Speech and Democracy
John Dewey:
…the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. … Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion which — as the example of totalitarian states proves — is effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in the minds of individual human beings.
“Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” in The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, p. 342.