Thread by @GorwayGlobal

1/n Thread.. The loss of a free and independent press is more worthy of lamentation than a few points off the GDP figures or a fall of the currency. Governments everywhere have offered security and prosperity in return for a curtailment of our liberties and a compliant press.

2/n "He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security."
- Benjamin Franklin

3/n “It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

4/n “A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”
― Albert Camus

5/n "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost".
-Thomas Jefferson

6/n "Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it."
- Thomas Jefferson

7/n "The freedom of the press should be inviolate."
-John Quincy Adams

8/n "Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Where ever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press".
- Calvin Coolidge

9/n "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." - Hugo Black

"Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it IS democracy."
- Walter Cronkite

10/n "We have to uphold a free press and freedom of speech - because, in the end, lies and misinformation are no match for the truth."
- Barack Obama @POTUS44

11/n "Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. ... And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment..."
John F Kennedy

12/n "Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.". George Orwell, in Reflections on Gandhi

13/n "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt,

14/n "A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable."
- Carl Sagan

15/n "Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

16/n "Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy - and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks."
- @ShashiTharoor