Daily Inspiration Quote by Al Goldstein

“Crusader” is a deliberately sanctifying word for a man best known for selling what polite society called smut. Goldstein isn’t begging to be liked; he’s insisting on a framework where liking him is irrelevant. By casting himself as a First Amendment absolutist, he swaps the usual morality play (pornographer as corrupter) for a constitutional drama (publisher as defendant). It’s a rhetorical judo move: if the argument is about rights, the audience has to confront its own commitment to free speech rather than simply recoil.

The line also exposes a canny understanding of how American freedoms actually function. “I use it fully” isn’t a civic-club bromide about principle; it’s a claim of maximum exercise. Goldstein is saying: the amendment is not a museum piece, it’s a stress test. And the phrase “pay a price” does double work. It signals martyrdom, yes, but also acknowledges consequence without conceding wrongdoing. The cost could be legal harassment, obscenity prosecutions, public vilification, financial instability - the ecosystem of punishment that doesn’t always require a conviction to be effective.

Context matters: Goldstein operated in the post-1960s churn of obscenity law, when courts, police, and local politicians used “community standards” as a weapon, and when pornography was an easy target for cultural panic. His intent is less to romanticize himself than to shame a selective libertarianism that loves free speech until it’s embarrassing. The subtext: if your First Amendment only protects respectable speech, you don’t believe in it at all.