Quotes About Censorship

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

Ultimately, he decreed that anyone who published a book without prior approval would be excommunicated.

Question for the Family Feud game show: "Name something that you can't say on TV.

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.

A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?" I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.

Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others.

Since Thami had the Arab's utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove.

A child's parents should be able to forbid their son or daughter from reading a book of mine or anyone else's. However, those same parents should have zero control over what everyone else's kids can read.

Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn't pull the trigger?

Art has an obligation to offend

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

Throughout history, self-styled arbiters have taken it upon themselves to decide the question of what can or cannot be the legitimate purview of art.

Obscenity, who really cares. Propaganda, all is phony.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first.

Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

anybody who tried to sound the alarm was branded a far-right, racist xenophobe

Free speech is not really free if it costs you all that you have.

There's no real samizdat in the U.S. per se, First Amendment-wise, I don't think. I suppose ultra-radical Quebecois and Albertan stuff could be considered O.N.A.N.ite samizdat.

In one scene she says fuck.