People Demand Freedom Of Speech As

The exact formulation does not appear in Søren Kierkegaard's published works but is consistent with arguments scattered throughout Either/Or (1843) and his journals. Kierkegaard was deeply suspicious of abstract liberal defences of freedom of expression because he thought most people used public discussion as a substitute for genuine individual thought. He often observed that the "crowd" demands rights it does not know how to exercise and that genuine freedom of thought is rare and frightening — it requires actually committing to a position and living by it. The attribution may derive from a paraphrase of journal entries rather than a direct quotation.