Quotes About Censorship

I have grown up in a country where we are told that there is freedom of speech.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that's a bad thing for society.

Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.

Any suggestion that what is offered in that marketplace should at least be an idea rather than a raw appeal to passion is met with cries of Censorship! Those who cry the most loudly, however, are not always concerned to preserve freedom of discussion. More often, discussion is what they want to prevent, and they have discovered that reciting the ritual word censorship is an effective way to do it.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.

Whether it's people walking off 'The View' when Bill O'Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

The people on the far left, they claim to be about free speech and expression. But as soon as you put something out there that offends them, all of a sudden, no - free speech out the window.

I plan on suing all of the Left wing terrorists and tech tyrants who are trying to shut me down simply because I am a Conservative Jewish woman who speaks truth about Islam.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

Everything that has to do with sex is somehow... it's the best thing in the world, and it's still the one thing people don't want you to talk about.

The only thing that is obscene is censorship.

I had the X rating on my films. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.

The Lord Chamberlin was censoring scripts when I first came into the theater.

You go to a theater now and you literally see parents watching the movie and they suddenly cover their kid's ears. I figured I'd make one movie where they didn't have to do this.

Once the censorship board clears a film, there should not be any other obstacle for a film's theatrical run.

You can't censor people's dreams.

The more totalitarian a regime's nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Ko?akowski, reflects "the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.

Of what use is freedom of speech to those who fear to offend?

When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?