Quotes About Censorship

I don't see on television the kind of blood and guts and body parts blown apart that maybe you're referring to, but it certainly is in that BATMAN feature and I found it very offensive.

Madam, I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.

Well, I'm not afraid to say something if I think it's funny, even if it's harsh or racist.

I think, in general, this country makes a huge deal about nudity and not a big enough deal about violence. We're allowed to cut people's heads off on shows - but not allowed to show breasts or somebody breastfeeding or whatever. I think it's a big deal in America especially. But I think to each is own.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.

Censorship is the height of vanity.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.

the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.

Si la libertad significa algo, será, sobre todo, el derecho a decirle a la gente aquello que no quiere oír.»

The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts... if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.