Quotes About Censorship

Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.

Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don't even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that's wrong.

I discovered the National Coalition Against Censorship when I felt totally alone in my fight to protect intellectual freedom, and that group changed my life. I was no longer alone.

That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.

We do not want to interfere with the freedom of press.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

They tried to stop us even saying the names of some of the most precious parts of our bodies. But here's what I learned. If something isn't named, it is not seen, it doesn't exist.

Falo porque não devia falar.

I'm not sure if those earlier issues have really been resolved or if they've just been censored from the internet. After experiencing so much censorship, I have come to grow numb about the whole thing. Yesterday I said that we are our own worst enemies; this process of becoming enemies of ourselves probably begins with that feeling of numbness.

Concealment is the brother of censorship.

Loretta Young, a world-class Catholic who kept a "swear box" on the set into which everyone had to make a deposit for their naughty words. Merman saw it, turned to Loretta, and said, "What the hell is this?" Loretta smiled sweetly and said, "Oh, Ethel, I'm afraid now you have to put twenty-five cents into the swear box." Ethel gave her a look and grinned as she said, "How much will it cost me to tell you to go fuck yourself?

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

I also said that in my next life, I wanted to be Swedish. In Islam, the censor said, there is no next life. There is only one life. I hope that in my next life, I do not have to deal with censors.

The burning of Joan was an attempt to deaden a great deal more than a young woman with pretensions of prophesy. It was also an attempt to eradicate the nascent possibility of agency in a woman, of a possible weakness in the dominant discourse, requiring constant vigilance and cleansing, lest it be uncovered.

Why shouldn't we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word "obscenity." If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick.

We are going through a sexual tempest, a bombardment provided by unprecedented exploitation of cheap sex by moviemakers, theater owners, publishers, and producers of pornography. [There is more] openness of talk about sex, acceptance of public nudity . . . homosexuality. Sex revolution, no! But sex pollution? Yes!!

Sex-centered magazines litter our newsstands . . . each edition trying to escape new laws from the bottom of the sewers. We put lids on sewer holes. Ought we not to do something about the pornography which is spewing out a polluted river of filth which can destroy us faster than any chemical pollution we seem so worried about?7

One result of family failure has been the loss of dignity. No better example can be found than in the use of language. It's a four-letter word in movies, on television, in comedy routines, and in real life. Time magazine asks, "Are the '90s destined to be the Filth Decade?

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.

To the Richmond Leader in 1966 when the school board banned her novel: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is 'immoral' has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people.