Quotes About Censorship

If a man is pictured chopping off a woman's breast, it only gets a R rating, but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman's breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?

If you hate what you're seeing, you call it sex and violence. If you like it, you call it 'romance and adventure.'

I think American audiences are quite interesting in that they can handle almost any amount of violence, but the moment the violence becomes sexual violence it immediately becomes an issue.

Well I don't think sex and violence have ever stopped a movie from being mainstream.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.

We've seen violent responses to 'Satanic Verses.' We've seen violent responses to the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in an evil way.

'The Bone Season' is violent. There's sex. My little brother keeps asking to read it, and he's 9, so I'm like, 'No, it's not happening.'

The original 'RoboCop' was X-rated, and then they had to cut it down so it became R-rated, and Verhoeven claimed that actually made the movie more violent, because it's what you don't see that actually scares you.

The only time I've ever felt like I needed to measure my activity and involvement in holding people accountable for being violent on social media is when I think about the things that I might lose for saying something. That's the only time I end up thinking about it.

We were all blocked from western media, outside information. We were captured in a virtual prison cell. People would disappear in the middle of the night - not every day, but sometimes. We hear about it, and we never knew what happened inside the prison camps. I learned about them after I escaped.

It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false.

There are two kinds of books in the world--the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won't let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and if there isn't then what happens when you die, and how come the history books have so many lies in them.

They decreed that rabbis were no longer to function as rabbis, that they could not teach, or decide Jewish questions in rabbinical courts, or be paid by their community. Each of them had to announce in the Yiddish press that he had ceased all rabbinical duties and that no one was to consult him about anything. This was to be the end of hundreds and hundreds of years of religious life.

They [intellectuals] coined most of the slogans that guided the butcheries of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism. Intellectuals extolling the delights of murder, writers advocating censorship, philosophers judging the merits of thinkers and authors, not according to the value of their contributions but according to their achievements on battlefields, are the spiritual leaders of our age of perpetual strife.

Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots.' UMBERTO ECO

They used to burn books, you know

They were afraid of them, you see. Frightened of ideas. Frightened of the truth. People still are

The powers that be, the Great Unelected Consciences of the World, didn't approve of what she said and that was the end of her.

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.

Hollywood desires money but they could not stand the political content.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

I think everyone has a door in their brain that says, 'Do not exit here.' If you go past it, you'll find all the dumb thoughts in there, all the stupid things that shouldn't be said. I've probably gone there more than anyone should in a given lifetime.