Quotes About Censorship

We are not against cinema," Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, "we are against prostitution!")

Let's be honest. Sometimes art is dangerous, though. And that's why governments sometimes get nervous about art. But one of the things I truly believe is if you try to suppress the arts, then I think you are suppressing the deepest dreams and aspirations of the people.

En la Unión Soviética, igual que en los países del Este y en Corea del Norte, los censores exigían que el arte, la literatura y el cine estuvieran llenos de alegría, que los héroes fueran felices, que la trama hablara de lograr las cuotas de producción y que el final feliz pasara por un glorioso futuro revolucionario.

Los sacerdotes que predican el pensamiento positivo en Estados Unidos seguramente se quedarán desolados si ven que se habla de ellos en el mismo capítulo (y hasta en el mismo libro) que de los censores y propagandistas del estalinismo.

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.

Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were "liberating" rather than conquering their opponents' territories.)

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes, then four, then five . . . and then no one dared to be the first to stop. After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms, a factory director on the platform finally sat down, followed by the rest of the grateful assembly. He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years.278

My problem is with the warped value system our culture has. Why is it that if you knife a woman in a movie it's PG, but if you swear at her it's rated R and if you make love to her it's rated X?

My kids love anime, but I don't show them the really graphic stuff

I love playing in the UK because there are some topics that you just can't talk about in the States without getting run out of town. So let me just say this: Louis C. K.'s new show sucks.

Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies.

Without free speech there is no true thought.

Hay a quien la palabra libertad no se le cae de la boca, pero la entienden como el derecho que ellos tienen a ejercerla. La censuran a los demás cuando no les conviene que salgan a la luz determinadas cosas.

Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?"

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

Sex is only a three-letter word so how can it be dirty?

Freedom of speech is essential to freedom of thought; it is essential to democratic self-governance; and the alternative-- government censorship and control of ideas-- has always led to disaster.

Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day — the erotic mind is not very politically correct.

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

I don't regret anything I ever do or say. I don't like to live my life being censored. I like to say what I feel, and I think people respect that because you're honest.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.