Censorship Quotes

Knowledge cannot defile nor consequently the books if the will and conscience be not defiled.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion and if we were sure stifling it would be an evil still.

John Stuart Mill

No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.

Thomas Jefferson

Censorship like charity should begin at home but unlike charity it should end there.

Clare Boothe Luce

Obscenity is whatever gives a judge an erection.

Anonymous American Lawyer

You censure this with difficulty because you have allowed it to become customary.

St. Jerome

I am mortified to be told that in the United States of America the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry and of criminal inquiry too.

Thomas Jefferson

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.

Voltaire

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Claude Adrien Helvétius

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

Walt Whitman

No member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Samuel Johnson

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Oscar Wilde

When something needs to be said, I'll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet.

Elif Shafak

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.

Isaac Deutscher

It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.

Adolf Hitler

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

I curse when I get really upset. Letting off steam that way makes me feel a little bit better. I've been through a lot, but I have never had the urge to go postal. I thank fuck for that.

Oliver Markus Malloy

In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.

Milan Kundera

The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.

Bruce Coville

[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric.

John Marshall Harlan

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

Frank Zappa

Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air! So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 2006; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose--oh, what a wailing!--and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More! And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and the shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists' Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at a fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'Curiouser and curioser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!

Ray Bradbury

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Rikki Ducornet

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.

Laurier Rochon

. . . I can see how the issue of exercising corporate control over users content is truly enraging here, on a site significantly made by these contributors. It’s unavoidable that we come to this, in my opinion (corporations always do), and GR/Amazon has all keys to the kingdom, but I can see why it’s so disappointing and enraging.Your content is theirs to do with as they please, their software works as they want, your choices are take it or leave it.The Internet is no longer for sharing (nor for porn!), it’s for corporations to exercise their control over users.

G.R. Reader

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

Ronald Reagan

In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.

Yuval Noah Harari

Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty.

Judy Blume

Every day, librarians enforce copyright policies that we may disagree with and that, in some ways, run contrary to the values of our profession. Every day, librarians must decide between a desire to preserve the privacy of our community members and offering services our communities demand. Every day, librarians must make a choice between doing what’s easy, doing what’s right, and determining what’s right in the first place. No textbook or mission statement or policy document can relieve us of the necessity to make those decisions, nor remove the complexity of those decisions. That’s why we are librarians and why librarians are professionals, not clerks. That’s why we are stewards within the communities we serve, not servants to them. That’s why we must shape the missions and the work of our organizations and communities, and not simply accept them.

R. David Lankes

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

George Orwell

Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldn’t say anything bad about it.

James Rozoff

In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]

Anthony Marra

Censorship: It allows you not to think for yourself.

Anthony T.Hincks

American society has willfully deleted the fact of homosexual behavior from its mind, laundering things as they come along, in order to maintain a more comfortable illusion. The censors removed it; the critics said, "Well, look! It isn't there"; and anyone who still saw it was labeled a pervert

Vito Russo

Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.

Martin Baker

1. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the things they read (or watch, or listen to, or taste, or whatever). They’re also entitled to express them online.2. Sometimes those opinions will be ones you don’t like.3. Sometimes those opinions won’t be very nice.4. The people expressing those may be (but are not always) ass

John Scalzi

[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.

John Locke

It was a pleasure to burn.It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Ray Bradbury

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

David Davis

And then they started deleting the protest reviews.That was my line. When they started to stamp out dissent, actually to make it disappear with virtually no excuse for doing so...that’s not neglect. That’s not an overwhelmed person or people trying to figure it out. That’s an entity that has decided that they do not care, that they have moved on from the issue, do not see it as an issue, and is trying to avoid bad press. Or they are too far down the line to backtrack on what they’ve been doing and save face. They’re content with their wildly inconsistent policy enough to no longer care what effect it is having on their user base. If you try to silence dissent, then something is very, very wrong.

G.R. Reader

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Christopher Hitchens

Irreverence is our only sacred cow.

Paul Krassner

It is really exhausting to live in a dictatorship of 'Me', which is basically a tyranny of others.

Stefan Molyneux

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

George Bernard Shaw

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

Bruce Coville

At CBS, I’m in your house. I’m mindful of that. When I do standup, you’re in my home and I can say what I want to.

Craig Ferguson

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas.

Pete Hautman

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

Stephen Chbosky

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.

Judy Blume

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.

Tommy Smothers

If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.

Ice-T

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

Lytton Strachey

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

Pat Conroy

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!

Ray Bradbury

A lot of bands make two different music videos for their latest songs. A censored version for American TV, and an uncensored version that includes nudity for European music stations. The so-called Land of The Free doesn't seem so free anymore, when you realize that other countries have a lot more freedom.

Oliver Markus Malloy

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its pe

John F Kennedy

Every man — in the development of his own personality — has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential na

Thomas I. Emerson

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Censorship Quotes

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