It is freeing to say a truth. It does not have to be the truth. But something you believe is true. Milan Šimečka wrote, and his friends confirm it, that the freest he felt was after he was released from prison. Communists locked him up for nothing for more than a year, and after that he was no longer afraid to say what he thought.
If you stay silent, you will feel it over the long term and will start to compromise with your sanity. There are a lot of broken people who do not even longer know what they think. They stripped themselves from this. Because if you want to live with something you do not agree with and stay sane, you start to convince yourself that black is white. But on a deeper level, you feel that black is black.