Quotes About Self-censorship

But we're left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.

When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'

Self-censorship has become a part of me. I think because we live in a place where community is very important, family is very important, you feel the weight of how people look at you. Even though I might seem very modern and very liberated, I still have a lot of issues to deal with. I'm scared of how people look at me.

When I think of the things that I want to write, I can never say them out loud because I know how crazy they sound. I know what things sound like when you haven't actually worked on the script, so I don't go around saying some of these ideas because they just sound awful.

On Broadway, there is no censoring, just self-censorship and doing what makes sense.

In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced--writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices--all because of fear. How many have resorted to self-censorship? How many are saying to themselves, Nope ... can't write about that. Can't teach that book. Can't have that book in our collection. Can't let my student write that editorial in the school paper.

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

I really do have a self-censorship problem, which isn't the way you should be if you're a cartoonist.

I censor myself all the time.

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.

Once you get used to censorship, sometimes you self-censor.

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.

A lot of times, we censor ourselves before the censor even gets there.

She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn't fit into a rigid frame.

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

Having to censor yourself - whether it's lying at the water cooler about how you spent your weekend, scrubbing your Facebook page of any revealing facts, or pretending to be with someone you aren't - is the antithesis of our foundation as a nation based on freedom of expression and association.

There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.

There is nothing more dangerous for a population than self-censorship by fear.

I draft things on Twitter five or six times now, where as five, six years ago, I probably would just post and not really censor myself as much. But now I'm like, well, I don't want to post that I ate at McDonald's because then I'm going to get someone telling me I'm fat.

I was definitely the kid who was the chicken, who didn't want to say the cuss words.

Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.