Quotes About Silencing

In the Roman world, Ovid's Metamorphoses – that extraordinary mythological epic about people changing shape (and probably the most influential work of literature on Western art after the Bible) – repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing of women in the process of their transformation.

You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God's fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.

The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.

In America, people will look past a criminal record. In England, they try and shut you up.

When you talk about kicking racism out of football, people automatically assume you are talking about on the terraces and on the football field. But all racists have to do is keep their mouth shut for 90 minutes and they're fine.

Usually on films, you get used to kind of being told, 'This is what you're going to wear, this is what you're going to hold, and remember, you're lucky to be here, and shut up.'

There's a long history and a pattern of Black athletes - and Black people, period - being told to shut up and accept whatever it is they're given.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become.

In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.

It's impossible to put a video online without hoards of anonymous men picking apart your appearance or saying especially cruel things. It works to silence women who shouldn't be scared of sharing their opinions with others.

Every time I speak up about anything to do with women or ethnic minorities, hundreds of messages pour in to attempt to silence or frighten me.

Democrats want more censorship, not less, as long as it silences conservative voices.

There are panel shows that struggle to get women on, and that's because the women feel marginalised and stupid and in the edit are often seen just laughing at the boys and not saying anything at all even though I know for a fact in the recording they were clever. I'm not shy at speaking up, but even I, on those shows, am silenced.

It is clearly a political move to remove 8chan from Cloudflare. It has forced a lot of people to find other places to talk. It has dispersed a peacefully assembled group of people talking. This silenced them effectively.

The contributions of influential African Americans have frequently been ignored, underrepresented, and even silenced.

these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.