Quotes About Censorship

You can't cuss on TV. It does hurt your brand if you do stuff like that. That's not what blue chip sponsors are looking for.

In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.

The Left wants to silence conservative Christians in the media and in the political square.

I want to stand up for free speech.

Stand-up comedy is a raunchy profession.

It's really frustrating when you write a show and it's really funny and someone and from Standards and Decency says, 'You can't put that in because it has a naughty word.'

The Pentagon Papers case stands today as a barrier to silence by official edict.

I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Whenever books are burned, men also in the end are burned.

The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Where the hand of tyranny is long we do not see the lips of men open with laughter.

People must not think that all bad in man which is unleashed, the moment you impose censorship disappears from man.

Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.

the uncandid censurer always picks out the worst man of a class, and then confidently produces him as being a fair specimen of it.

You have the right to free speech, as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it.

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

Perhaps a film which strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office.

All these nervous people, from the unemployed to the public figure liable at any moment to incur the wrath of those whose investment he represents, believe that only by empathy, assiduity, serviceability, arts and dodges, by tradesmen's qualities, can they ingratiate themselves with the executive they imagine omnipresent, and soon there is no relationship that is not seen as a 'connection', no impulse not first censored as to whether it deviates from the acceptable.

If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question.

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.

I played Nelson Mandela in one thing for laughs - and I did it because this thing had come round from the BBC that we couldn't do it any more.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Can any sane person say that before something comes on the Net you must screen it? How can there be pre-screening?