Always check the source, a nice principle to live by even though we (OK, I ) don’t do it 100% of the times. For many years I also repeated this quasi-legal slogan till I got corrected. Last night, it was somebody else’s turn:
The case I mention at the bottom is Schenck v. United States (1919) and the misquoted passage is the opinion of the court written by Justice Holmes:
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.
Listen, we are not perfect so expect being corrected. Be open-minded to the corrections, but make sure you are not being led to the primrose patch. Trust but Verify to coin a phrase.
And… don’t be a dick till you have full confidence your opponent deserves it. Some people will actually appreciate the correction even if they will not share your view.
Chris @digitalbrain242 has not returned a comment, nor I expect one that would make sense or be anything else that “YOU ARE A NAZI!” which is the new “You are racist!” And there is a meme for that!
Besides that, that ruling comes from a court case long overridden.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/
I have to correct folks misusing the phase ALL THE DAMNED TIME! Falsely shouting fire was a serious problem at the time Holmes uttered this phrase.
I have a well-written historian’s analysis of this at home on my desktop and will post a link this evening for folks to read through (or will email the file to you, Miguel).
Send or post… Whatever is convenient for you 🙂
“In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.”
“If everybody is Hitler, than nobody is Hitler.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created Hitler…”
“…wouldn’t you like to be a Hitler too?”
Here’s the link to the interesting analysis I referred to above: “‘Shouting Fire in a Theater’: The Life and Times of Constitutional Law’s Most Enduring Analogy” — https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2548849