Quotes About Censorship

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.

If you are going to stick to the truth then you need to keep your distance from the Chinese government and indeed to any form of politics, including the politics of democratic countries.

Censorship may promote the lies, but it does not alter the truth.

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body. Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that.

Did you know you can't say 'Jesus' in a sitcom? They told me that, and I was like, You gotta be kiddin' me. If you don't want my God here, you don't want me here either.

China's Internet will continue to be policed and controlled, information filtered, sites prohibited, noncompliant search engines excluded, and sensitive search words disallowed. And where China goes, others, also informed by different values, are already and will follow.

People enjoy sitting back knowing they won't hear a lot of four-letter words.

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.

La vostra, cari amici, non è cronaca. E' pornografia dei sentimenti. E a noi non piace fare lo spogliarello della nostra anima davanti a tutti.

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.

In 1956 he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.

A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence.

Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.

inclined toward Jews or Catholics. The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. "I now have an America First library," he said proudly.

Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn "under a certain condition of insanity," and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.

New Rule: The White House doesn't have to release the dead Bin Laden photos, but don't pretend we can't take it. We've seen pictures of Britney Spears's vagina getting out of a car. Television has desensitizes us to violence, and porn has desensitized us to people getting shot in the eye.

Without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp.

Wherever books are burned, ultimately people are also burned.

está empeñado en guardarse para sí ciertas cosas, eso es evidente..., y supongo que no siempre puede acordarse de qué ha de permanecer en secreto y qué no.

How clever of them, I thought. They kept the feeling all secret; they wouldn't even let you write it down.

Burning a book's like burning a human being. Once yer start burning books, yer end up burning the entire world, every damn human being in it!

I would like to discuss the psychological determinates in your use of copulative profanity.