Quotes About Censorship

I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.

Just be glad you don't live in one of those little countries where at this very moment, music is severely restricted, or as it is in Iran, totally illegal.

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

It's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.

[C]ensorship in any form is the opening wedge for fascism, since it places arbitrary and unwarranted power in the hands of individuals.

Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job: who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour.

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.

Of all times in time of war the press should be free.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

the subversion of free speech and free thought are the worst forms of subversion.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say. It's one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

The history of censorship in twentieth-century America is largely a story of self-regulation in the name of self-preservation—voluntary restraint enacted on the assumption that governmental restriction would be worse.

When the Associated Press picked up the story from local accounts, readers of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other papers around the country learned how, just three years after the Second World War, American citizens were burning books.

the Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, a list that came to include almost every significant work of post-medieval Western philosophy.

And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.

Another plague upon the land, as devastating as the locusts God loosed on the Egyptians, is 'Political Correctness.'

The Internet is truly God's gift to the Chinese people.