Quotes About Censorship

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.

The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.

I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.

Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.

Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

Los regímenes demagógicos exigen que olvidemos y, por tanto, estigmatizan los libros como un lujo superfluo; los regímenes totalitarios quieren que no pensemos y, por consiguiente, prohíben y amenazan y censuran; ambos, en general, necesitan que nos volvamos estúpidos y que aceptemos con mansedumbre nuestra degradación y por eso alientan el consumo de productos vacuos. En circunstancias como ésas, los lectores no pueden más que ser subversivos.

Every day, somewhere in the world, someone attempts (sometimes successfully) to stifle a book... And again and again, empires fall and literature continues.

I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)

To the puritan all things are impure

They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science.

In Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt 'a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with'. He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated.

Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150.

Do I shock you? I think I do. That's the problem these days – nobody speaks their mind. No, don't smile. They really don't. We've been browbeaten into conformity by all sorts of people who tell us what we can and cannot say. Haven't you noticed it? The tyranny of political correctness. Don't pass any judgement on anything. Don't open your trap in case you offend somebody or other.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex.

Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.

Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it. G.

I have great pride in taking Dick and Jane out of most school libraries. That is my greatest satisfaction.

In the Arab world, censorship follows speech. In America, censorship precedes speech.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.