Quotes About Censorship

If the guardians of society, the protectors of 'young persons,' could have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley. The voices that thrill the world would now be silent.

I think one of the things that writers and creative artists generally have to deal with is the censors that we have in our heads, the voices that we have that say you better not tell that and don't tell that, and people will think you're not a good girl, and your grandmother's going to be mad at you and all of those things.

I am not going to stand by as people like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg silence the voices of millions of conservatives.

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.

The solution to voters potentially being misled by a judicial candidate's political speech is more speech - not government censorship.

I don't believe in political self-censorship.

Sex should not be in the movies and should be in the home, and violence should be in the movies and not in the home.

With a lot of those 'S.N.L.' shorts, we would do them just as we wanted to do them and then beep out the bad words. Since it was late night T.V., they let us get away with a lot.

Nothing should be banned. I think it is just not good.

If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.

I've been banned from just about everything.

It was all men, and there I was prancing around in gowns that barely got past the censors.

Don't join the book burners," he said. "Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

Joe began to get publicity-crazy," Smith recalled in an interview with the historian David M. Oshinsky. "And the other senators were now afraid to speak their minds, to take issue with him. It got to the point where some of us refused to be seen with people he disapproved of. A wave of fear had struck Washington.

I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.

Don't you know what a pussy is, sir?' 'Of course he doesn't. He hasn't even seen Basic Instinct.

the inquisitors were especially interested in what Christians did under the covers and behind closed doors.

Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

The trouble with free speech is that it insists on living up to its name.

Menard —recuerdo— declaraba que censurar y alabar son operaciones sentimentales que nada tienen que ver con la crítica.

Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature¬Ã¢â'¬â€the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.