In freedom of speech, the accent is on freedom, not on speech.-- ----------------------------------------------- ...my point of view is that under our constitution no American citizen is born with an original sin. Therefore, the burden is not upon any of the citizens in our country to prove that our speech is beyond reproach, but respected and protected by the constitution. The difficulty I've had is with the people who confuse themselves with the authorities. Which I believe is a quasi-religious point of view. ------------------------- Again, that they have not a truly religious view but a quasi-religious view that the law is something that is out to trap you. They don't realize that it is created by We The People. They think there is a good and evil in the law instead of a right and wrong in the law - ----------------------------------------------------I never talked about sex on the stage. I discuss religion . . . I criticise the authorities . . . but sex, that's not my point of view, that's not my interest. The way I do my act is that I portray many different characters throughout many different regions. I do the dialect of the regions; therefore, I do the portrayal of the character. To have each character speaking like a Cockney, but talking as an Italian, the people would think I was absurd. So the character has to be real. And that cliché about freedom of speech doesn't mean you can go far in a crowded theatre. Because the stage is make-believe: you can kill Christ on stage, and no one takes you away at the end and puts you in jail. It's make-believe! The mistake is to believe that the American theatre is an instruction of morality, which it is not. The reason the Supreme Court is very concerned with the First Amendment is that it is the only strength our country has. In freedom of speech, the accent is on freedom, not on speech. It's the right to get it across, to communicate - the right of the reader to read it and the person to say it. In other words, a discussion on syphilis is not an instruction to get it. A country can only be strong when it knows all about the bad - the worst, worst things. When it knows about the bad, then it can protect itself. The country that only knows all about the nice things about itself ends in failure, as Hitler did.
just people, man