Quotes About Censorship

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

It's better to use a curse word than to hurt somebody else, I find.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

If there is no word that means you don't have the concept. In North Korea they eliminate the words: depression, stress, dictatorship, human rights. You cannot think of those. That's why all the brainwashing was possible.

In my songs there are no bad words, so kids can sing them, and girls can identify with singing with them, too, because it's not like a man singing reggaeton.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

Some comedians tell nice jokes that you can tell to your kids. Some use bad words - they work 'blue.' If you don't want to hear a joke that's blue, you shouldn't go to a comedy club where a comedian who makes blue jokes is performing.

I won't go to movies with permissiveness, four-letter words, or violence. Show me 'E.T.' and 'Chariots of Fire' instead. That's entertainment, not exploitation of the human body.

Any society that starts forbidding certain words or expressions is a society you should be wary about, whether it's the KGB or social consensus that enforces it.

Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.

It is true that authoritarian governments increasingly see the Internet as a threat in part because they see the U.S. government behind the Internet.

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

When the public's right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered.

It is without doubt that freedoms of the press and speech need to be protected, but there are undisputed limits to these freedoms, limits that often come into play when national security is threatened.

Terrorism has come to publishing. It is a grave concern when criticism is turned to mortal threats.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

You are not going to silence me. You are not going to silence America. You are literally like a little gangster thug. Rubio just threatened to silence me.

When 'Goodfellas' is on TNT, and they've taken out all the curse words and put Tide commercials in the middle of it, I'll still watch 'Goodfellas' because it's that great of a movie.

We have this sort of tacit censorship, which is the ratings system, and it's directly tied to box office, so it is censorship. Like, if you make an R-rated movie, you know that only a certain amount of people are going to go see it under any circumstance.

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.