Quotes About Censorship

Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain.

Talvolta si può cadere nell'equivoco di credere che certa letteratura induca a certi comportamenti, quando è vero esattamente il contrario. È sempre la domanda a precedere la risposta. [...] La letteratura (anche quella disegnata) ha la possibilità di mantenere circoscritte nell'ambito della fantasia quelle ossessioni che altrimenti troverebbero un inevitabile sfogo nella realtà. [...] La censura è sempre dannosa.

Emperors uphold censorship, But extreme repression leads to extreme reaction. Individualists believe in freedom, But extreme expression leads to extreme reaction.

I'm in a town where twenty years ago a dyke couldn't buy a dildo but this hadn't ket some mighty queer fucking from going on.

When they tote up our contribution," Luke once said, "all that can be claimed for us is that we took 'fuck' out of the oral tradition and wrote it plain.

I don't think fascism is dying for.

Letters circulated without censorship, with a freedom that astonishes the twentieth-century mind.… The subjects of two warring nations talked to each other if they met, and when they could not meet, corresponded, not as enemies but as friends.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex. But

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

Freedom has its risks. Suppression of freedom, I believe, is a sure prescription for disaster.

In the long run, an open airing of discriminatory ideas, and an ensuing debate about them, may well be more effective in curbing them than censorship would be.

Es terrible que estuviéramos tan asustadas de que nos vieran con libros que tenemos todo el derecho a leer

It's terrible, … for us to have been so scared to be seen with books we have every right to read.

She wondered if she should have explained herself more clearly. She could not explain herself at all. There were no words, no permitted words, to explain anything that she wanted to say. All the words that could have communicated it had been banned, not only from her mouth but even from her mind. She was reduced to mere actions, which are both more and less than words.

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.

First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

Can someone within that society walk into the town square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.

You can't ban books, people will find them

You cannot ban books. People can find them".

A persistent preoccupation with "freedom of speech" to the neglect of other freedoms can diminish the shelter available for religion and other precious freedoms. The intertwining of all our freedoms is greater than we realize. . . . It may be true . . . that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had absolute free speech, but did they have anything worth saying?

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.