Knowledge is essential to freedom, former President Bill Clinton said Thursday evening, speaking to a crowd of about 900 people at the 200th birthday celebration of the Arkansas Gazette at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.
"Technology and the movement toward authoritarianism all over the world are driving us to the point where ordinary people may find it hard to tell fact from fiction or truth from a bald-faced lie," he said. "If that happens, then it will be impossible to sustain meaningful democratic government."
He praised the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's legacy of providing readers with the facts that they need to know.
"We need to know things and we need to be able to have discussions, even arguments, with our neighbors based on the same set of facts," he said.
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