Quotes About Censorship

Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death.

We can self-censor ourselves for various reasons, but we can't live in a world where some person or some group decides what's offensive and what's not.

The greatest risk in giving our government any power to control our speech is that it would then have a vehicle to prohibit speech that was critical of it.

There are some things I feel the need to pussyfoot around that I would like to... give vent to. But I realise the press isn't the place to do that.

I never understood why movies don't have to be as responsible, or the responsibility stops with Rated R. I feel like music, you gotta - you put the sticker on it, you make the clean version, then you're explaining yourself, and then you have to do charities to offset what you just said. No one else has to do this!

I don't censor myself, but I don't want to force my sick-skewed version of the world, either.

To this day, I like the version of movies that don't have the curse words. I'm very reserved that way.

Man, my little boy wanted to hear some new music. So it was like, I can't just play all my music around him, so I got to go ahead and make a whole project so I can get it clean, and have a clean version of all the songs just so he can listen to my music, you feel me?

Usually the audience has no idea that the censored version of whatever movie they're watching isn't the original.

Newspapers are a great place for cowards and malcontents to have their say.

1 say to the leaders of this great country, why not allow your people the same privileges we in the West take for granted? You can start by releasing Anatoly Babakov and allowing his book to be published. That is, if you have nothing to fear from the torch of freedom. 1 will not rest until 1 can buy a copy of Uncle Joe at Hatchards on Piccadilly, Doubleday on Fifth Avenue, Dymocks in Sydney, and George's bookshop in Park Street, Bristol.

Ez is olyan, mint a képek a múzeumban – állapította meg –, csak arra próbálnak ürügyet találni, hogy meztelen nÅ'ket mutogassanak.

Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people. They're bloodthirsty and capable of anything. You'll see. With those torches they'll first set Germany ablaze, and then the rest of Europe.

You know, there are some words I've known since I was a schoolboy: ' With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.' Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on we're all damaged. I fear that today...

The first time any man's freedom is trodden. With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied – chains us all, irrevocably.

One of them replied that they had come to punish Kosinski for The Painted Bird, a book that vilified their country and ridiculed their people.

In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that fuck could be protected political speech in Cohen v. California. This case overturned a 1968 conviction for "disturbing the peace" against an antiwar protestor who wore a jacket with the words "FUCK THE DRAFT" on it. John Marshall Harlan II noted in his decision that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric," arguing that a state cannot censor its citizens merely for the sake of civility.

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

I wanted to do my artistic work, and in Iran you have censorship. It was difficult for me to do the work I wanted to do.

I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.

Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students.