Quotes About Censorship

Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendhal Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

apparently London gave out my address! that's what they're saying...not just London, though! Brazzaville, too!...and said that I'm a dirty pornographer...a letch besides being the most despicable traitor of the century!...I'd make a urinal blush! that what we need is to cleanse France and the French language of this smut-writing, demoralizing, grammaclast who's sullying our sacred homeland and its literary heritage!

My mind flashed back to the Cultural Revolution, when a group of Red Guards pulled our neighbor, Granny Li, out of the opera company's dormitory block and ordered the rest of us to bring out our thermos flasks. We then had to stand and watch as the Red Guards poured ten flasks of boiling water over Granny Li's head.

In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.

The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians - because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.

Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?

In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.

I hate it when something I've had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I've written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.

Podrán callarnos, pero no pueden impedir que tengamos nuestras propias opiniones.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

One thing about American liberality, obscenity, etc. Just saw a book of Hemingway's—short stories—Winner Takes Nothing. He says out most anything and everything. For "fuck" they print "f---

Whore" goes, "Christ" goes, "shit" goes, etc. And yet somehow there is not the same ring behind his dirty words as with mine. Sincere enough, frank, honest, but not so raw. Almost seems justifiable. Mine seems flagrant and wanton.

The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too

Worrying about inciting racial hatred in cartoons is legitimate, so that no group is racially targeted. It is why we don't like anti-Semitic cartoons. This is entirely distinct from a "blasphemy" motivation for censorship, which aims to silence scrutiny of a powerful idea and its founder, inspiring to billions. We must not confuse these two different concerns. This is the core of what most of us, especially Muslims, must reflect on in the wake of the tragedy in France.

Una opinión no te la pueden censurar, te la tienen que rebatir. Un intelectual sin sentido crítico no un intelectual. Es un adulador.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

Unfortunately, one can hardly think or say anything right anymore without grievously wounding the state, the gods or public opinion.

To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list.

Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt... reading releases you from the limits of yourself.

I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.

Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Life is full of censorship. I cant spit in your eye.

Once we succumb to the temptations of censoring ideas with which we disagree, we step onto a slippery slope where everyone's freedom is at risk.