The book of Genesis tells us that when God created all things, He did so not with the snap of a finger or the wave of a magic wand. Instead, God used speech to create the sun, the moon and stars, the plants and the animals, and even mankind. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” While it is easy, as residents of a modern age full of remarkable technology and fearsome weapons, to assume the most powerful tools are those with the fastest processors or the loudest engines or the biggest payloads, the reality is that speech itself remains the weapon most feared by tyrants and most beloved by those in search of truth.

It is no coincidence that the most consequential inventions in history have all been related to the production or dissemination of thoughts and words. From cave drawings, to stone tablets, to papyrus scrolls, to Gutenberg’s printing press, to the telegraph, to the telephone and Internet, advances in communications technologies have arguably done more to shape the contours of human civilization than any other single technological factor on earth. Electricity and the internal combustion engine powered the industrial revolution, but neither has the power by itself to spark what Samuel Adams called the “brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

The men who settled and founded the United States of America understood this better than most and were unequivocal about the primary importance of protecting the freedom not just of thought or speech, but also the dissemination of both via the press. Madison and the other Founding Fathers knew that freedom of thought was impossible without the right to speak those thoughts, and that freedom of speech was incomplete without the right to print and distribute that speech as one saw fit.

When James Madison submitted the first draft of legislative language protecting the right of the people to speak their minds and publish their thoughts, he described the freedom of the press as “one of the great bulwarks of liberty.” Each of the Founding Fathers understood that a free country could not exist without the right to freely share one’s thoughts.