Best 381 quotes in «censorship quotes» category

What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities.

What I worry about most is the loss to young people. If no one speaks out for them, if they don't speak out for themselves, all they'll get for required reading will be the most bland books available. And instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding the novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object.

What’s ensued is a battle over ethical conduct, artistic freedom, and censorship in which every side—the activist zealots who threatened violence, the shock-tactic artists, and the controversy-courting, then risk-averse museum—has come out a loser.

Whenever you stand up For your conscience, Be prepared to be hated By the wicked. But never, ever, let that scare you; For whenever you Stand up for God, By him, You are loved. TRUTH by Suzy Kassem THE SPRING FOR WISDOM, 1993

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

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.

When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.

When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.

Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

Why do some people feel offended by the word shit, but not by the word poop? Because some little old lady at the FCC decided that good citizens don't use the word shit, and suddenly using a word like shit or fuck becomes an act of civil disobedience. Suddenly a little four-letter word has the power to shock.

When truth is replaced by a lie, the truth is a lie.” ― Jack Cohen

Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.

Word-banning seems to be a trend of late. It's become fashionable to try to ban words we're uncomfortable with, which you really can't do in the first place. You can no more ban a word than you can ban the air. In fact, language is a lot like air – ban it all you want, it's still there.

Women’s liberation fought for the right of women to leave the home and become involved in the public sphere; feminists now want to convert this realm into a series of safe spaces and censored zones. If you don’t like what someone says to you on the street, say something back, put your headphones on, or just laugh – it’s really not that bad.

Without the Nazis fewer people would have heard of the Bauhaus today and it would almost certainly seem a little less important. It is a pleasant irony.

Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the Truth, unlesse ye first make yourselves that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true Liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formall, and slavish as ye found us, but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous as they were from whom ye have free'd us.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

You must remember, burn them or they'll burn you...

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly. 'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud. 'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen. I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth.

youtube has been told to get rid of anything that disputes the official narrative of total lies

You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.

You're sad but you hold everything back...

Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.

A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions.

And although I'm all for freedom of expression and against censorship, there are certain things I'm not willing to go to jail for.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it.

A sodomite got very excited looking at a zoology text. Does this make it pornography?

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.

Burning is no answer.

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

Censorship is the height of vanity.

Censorship defeats the right to self determination.

Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem.

Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me.

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

Censorship, telling people how to live their lives I completely disagree with.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

Censorship has kind of disappeared in a way because everything is accessible online.

Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum.