Quotes About Censorship

There are certain things you must not say in spite of the fact that supposedly democracy means free speech. No. You are not allowed free speech. If you speak freely, you are then deemed as I was, to be a subversive.

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

To have art suppressed is very dangerous to society.

I am not in the business of suppressing books.

Liberals cannot win in the battle of ideas, so they resort to banning or suppressing ideas they don't like.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Advocates of 'free speech' often repeat the mantra that the best response to bad speech is more and better speech, not the suppression of the bad stuff.

I was shocked when I heard that Farghadani had been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison on spurious charges, as Amnesty International notes, of 'spreading propaganda against the system,' 'insulting members of the parliament through paintings' and 'insulting the Supreme Leader' with her cartoon.

the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.

Mi infancia y mi adolescencia habían transcurrido bajo la dictadura de Batista y el resto de mi vida bajo la aún más férrea dictadura de Fidel Castro; jamás había sido un verdadero ser humano en todo el sentido de la palabra

Desmond Morris informs me that John Lennon's magnificent song is sometimes performed in America with the phrase 'and no religion too' expurgated. One version even has the effrontery to change it to 'and one religion too'.

Once again, academia and the mass media are straining every muscle to suppress debate.

When people ask, "Why do we write morning pages?" I joke, "To get to the other side." They think I am kidding, but I'm not. Morning pages do get us to the other side: the other side of our fear, of our negativity, of our moods. Above all, they get us beyond our Censor. Beyond the reach of the Censor's babble we find our own quiet center, the place where we hear the still, small voice that is at once our creator's and our own.

Make this a rule: always remember that your Censor's negative opinions are not the truth.

Every few days the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, From Papa, With Love.

Perhaps nothing is so wounding to a writer than being accused of having written something that hurts a child. Censorship is an attitude of mistrust and suspicion that seeks to deprive the human experience of mystery and complexity. But without mystery and complexity there is no wonder; there is no awe; there is no laughter.

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

Was kann gewaltiger sein als die Zerstörung aller Bücher?

political correctness jeopardizes more than it should the human capacity to speak the truth

First to control the people, first control the media." Karl Marx

He, who boldly interposes between a merciless censor and his prey, is a man of vigor: and he who, mildly wise, without wounding, convinces him of his error, commands our veneration.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

Any man who'd make an X-rated movie ought to have to take his daughter to see it.

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.