"We seek for Truth" is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man.

Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.

The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
"'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when, under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his book while he lay in prison.

For this act you were in turn arrested and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by the imprisonment of a heretic.

The Republic of the United States dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary.