Incitement Vs. Fighting Words
Incitement is a related doctrine, allowing the government to prohibit advocacy of unlawful actions if the advocacy is both intended to and likely to cause immediate breach of the peace. The modern standard was defined in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), where the Court reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader accused of advocating violence against racial minorities and the national government. The Ohio statute under which the conviction occurred was overturned as unconstitutional because "the mere abstract teaching of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action."
The difference between incitement and fighting words is subtle, focusing on the intent of the speaker. Inciting speech is characterized by the speaker's intent to make someone else the instrument of his or her unlawful will. Fighting words, by contrast, are intended to cause the hearer to react to the speaker.
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Famous quotes containing the words fighting and/or words:
“The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)