Quotes About Censorship

No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they'd reach the point where nobody'd dare say anything at all.

If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

I can almost never say what I'm thinking at any given moment. I would have been stabbed to death years ago.

You know, sometimes just giving yourself permission to feel any emotion without judgment or censorship can lessen the intensity of those negative emotions.

You can show a dozen guys murderin' each other on TV but you can't ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.

Public meetings, business meetings, encounters on the street, conversations, even posters on the wall all get wrapped up in an official language that doesn't contain a single word of truth. People in the West can't possibly understand what it is really like to lose the right to say what you think for years on end, and the way you have to repress the tiniest illegal thought you might have and stay silent as the tomb. That sort of pressure breaks something inside people.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

The [Motion Picture Production Code] took effect on March 31, 1930, 5 months too late to prevent the Wall Street Crash, but early enough to keep The Sixties from happening until approximately 1964. (When America fell victim to the British Invasion).

For years I had been living in a kind of eternal present, shutting off all the past which disagreed with me, letting through only the most censored memories. As for the future, nothing was thought out. It simply happened, like the turning of the page. In filling my life with books, I was ... surrounding myself with other people's stories in order to obliterate my own.

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.

there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.

use the Lord's name in vain!

I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance

What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life.

Anyone—pope, propagandist, anti-Communist, anti-racist—who wants to silence criticism or regulate an argument in order to keep wrong-thinking people out of power has no moral claim to be anything but ignored.

No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., "harassment") and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words.

What was this place, do you think? A library? I think so. Don't suppose the commoners are allowed to read much anymore, are they? That's usually the way it goes.

We don't share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.

Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don't share thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.