Quotes About Censorship

The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough.

So great is society's demand for information that we can no longer say that all the news gathered is worthy of airing. Much of it is not.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

'Lolita' was a great wound in the side for me. I stuck my neck out maybe further than I should have and castigated the studio for not getting behind it.

Bashar al-Assad's henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims' occupations.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.

There are times over different projects when I've asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren't these swear words.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Coït, copulation. Mots à éviter. Dire : « Ils avaient des rapports… »

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.

Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

It was my first scene. My first day. We could have started with me drinking a beer, something a little less than having Barbies touching each other. But they started with that.

In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.