Quotes About Censorship

Through censorship, our opinions and attitudes will become prescribed by the authorities, with dissenting views labeled as heretical and punishable by law. If this happens, we will surely see the dissolution of the rest of our rights accelerate, unhindered by public scrutiny and outrage.

An assassin can be found for every president. And for every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. The time came when every book was cast into the fire, when every symphony was reduced to a popular tune and played in all the drinking dens. A sound philosophical basis could be set in place under any vile nonsense.

I am not sure I am ready to know what I think about that, so I dare not write it out.

I never ask no questions, I never speak my mind. I've always found that silence helps to keep me and my kind alive ...' Judas Priest

the effect of decensorship was the burgeoning of mass-market pornography. John Sutherland describes how the pornography industry developed in Britain subsequent to the 1959 Act and the great trials. "Meanwhile, in the shadows behind these spotlighted censorship spectacles, 'pornography' was growing steadily from a hole-in-the-corner specialist supply service to a multi-million pound, efficiently organised industry".

It's stupid to ban books that tell you the truth about life.

One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.

[Dalton] Trumbo wrote this incredible pamphlet, almost on the level of Tom Paine's 'Common Sense,' called 'The Time of the Toad.' It's an exquisitely written treatise regarding the black list era.

The challenge is that we live in a time where there's a lot of crap on television.

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

In country music, one of the ways we may have gone wrong in the past is trying to be politically correct all the time.

In nicey-nicey land, you must be happy-clappy and positive all the time - bad news is taboo.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

Despotism and freedom of the press cannot exist together.

Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture.

The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty.

In the ideal public library, we are all readers of the "middling sort." Reading whatever we will, we fulfill a public function, preserving the sacrosanct space of inner thought that is our birthright. Assaults on that birthright in the forms of legislation, surveillance, and censorship ultimately are precisely as dangerous as our acquiescence in them.

Once a country accepts censorship of the press and of speech, then nothing can be won without violence. Therefore, so long as you have free speech, protect it. This is the life-and-death issue in this country: do not give up the freedom of the press—of newspapers, books, magazines, television, radios, movies, and every other form of presenting ideas. So long as that's free, a peaceful intellectual turn is possible.

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you.

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe.

Could one really concentrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.

We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.