Quotes About Censorship

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

An M.P. once suggested I be put in the Tower of London for saying derogatory things about the royals. There's no First Amendment in my country.

What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.

It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.

The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

In war-time the word patriotism means suppression of truth.

Sometimes humour is all we have to say the things that can't be said.

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly. 'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud. 'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen. I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth.

American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth.

I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.

Could you imagine how horrible things would be if we always told others how we felt? Life would be intolerably bearable.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Still, a person who cannot express love is stopping the flow of life, is censoring where censorship is a form of self-indulgence, the fear of giving oneself away.

What he brought out was a wooden gag they put in someone's mouth before doing something drastic, like cutting off a leg.

They forbid the use of the word slavery by conservatives, the mention of Nazism by conservatives, or the mention of homosexuality in anything other than a positive context, to name a few of their rules.

What might be merely embarrassing in real life is made obscene and hostile by TV.

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.

The essence of nice people is that they hate life as manifested in tendencies to co-operation, in the boisterousness of children, and above all in sex, with the thought of which they are obsessed. In a word, nice people are those who have nasty minds.

All the governments of the world adopt elaborate methods of concealing truths which they consider undesirable, and inflict various forms of penalty upon those who spread knowledge which is thought bad for the population. This applies especially to knowledge of the kind which is considered seditious, and the kind which is considered obscene.

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.