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"There are some circumstances in which the First Amendment interest comes up against another interest that is really important and in which we have to make a decision in a particular case as to which is more important."
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"The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty."

"For the real writers, every decision is either write or wrong."

"Choices! Choices!! Choices!!! I have chosen love over hate. I have chosen faith over fears. I have chosen courage over cowardice. I have chosen strength over weakness. I have chosen positive thinking over negative thoughts."

"But men have loved darkness rather than light."

"Choices are abundant, it is the right decision which is the rare one!"

"I thought myself sufficiently shrewd to make whatever decisions I wanted to make, and then to be able to sufficiently steer those decisions away from the rather dark and nasty places they would naturally take me. And I stand oddly perplexed that suddenly everything around me is dark and nasty."
Explore more quotes by Floyd Abrams

"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."

"I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in."

"If the word gets out, if the perception exists that by speaking to a CBS journalist you are, therefore, inevitably, immediately speaking to the police, I don't think there's any doubt but that people won't talk. And, therefore, the public won't learn."

"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."

"The question at the end of the day was, the courts having found there was no defense, a producer about to go to jail, should CBS in effect tell the producer go to jail even though there is no law at all that we can use to get you out of jail?"

"The principle though remains the same, and the important thing is CBS fought hard, very hard, to protect that principle and will fight again."

"I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case."

"I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody."

"I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent."
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