Quotes About Censorship

Unfortunately, in our culture, one person can write a letter to the network, and they shut something down. It's unfortunate.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.

We don't live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union's; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.

Perhaps what's needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the Internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed.

Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

I avoided nudity unless a film couldn't be told without those scenes. If you look at my films, few of them have that element, yet nudity and male fantasies have become emblematic of my work.

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.

There are a lot of women out there who are doing crazy things behind closed doors sexual-wise and are afraid to admit it.

People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.

The only parts I like out of any of those women books is the dirty parts. But I don't think their dirty parts are any good, really.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

At the State Department, where I oversaw our human rights diplomacy, I often confronted dictatorships like China about their censorship of the Internet, which they justified by claiming they were merely filtering out lies. Our government cannot and should not take that path.

You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.

Radio stations provided a service. They weeded out the stuff that no one should ever have to even think about. Now, they made mistakes and they made mistakes with me even but, by and large, they provided a service. They were an editor.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

As Orwell once wrote, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"—most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.

If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth—as the metaphor of "the marketplace of ideas" suggests—we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens. The same is true of democratic justifications for free speech. If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source.

The people are the only censors of their governors, and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution.

No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will.