Censorship Quotes

I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper grey censorship of all our real human values ... ~ Jack Kerouac

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ~ Michel Foucault

Self-censorship can be very damaging to a story. When our chief goal is not to offend someone, we are not likely to write a book that will deeply affect someone. ~ Katherine Paterson

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

Although censorship from others is not acceptable, you practice it every day when you decide with what people you will share what information, otherwise our deepest feelings would be shared with all the wrong people. ~ D.S. Mixell

The difference was principally in the invisible places toward which their respective hearts were turned. They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he, facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo, across the Bhar El Hamar to Mecca. They thought in terms of grievances, censorship, petitions and reforms; he, like any good Moslem who knows only the tenets of his religion, in terms of destiny and divine justice. If the word 'independence' was uttered, they saw platoons of Moslem soldiers marching through streets were all the signs were written in Arabic script, they saw factories and power plants rising from the fields; he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction. ~ Paul Bowles

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
[Defend the right to be offended (openDemocracy, 7 February 2005)] ~ Salman Rushdie

By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech. ~ Harry A. Blackmun

Censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books
with one hand. ~ Robin Morgan

The function of the censor is to censor. He has a professional interest in finding things to suppress. ~ Thomas I. Emerson

Censorship & Torture.
Netherlands, Nuenen
August 17, 2016
P.C.M. Hermans ~ Petra Hermans

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility. ~ Anais Nin

HENRY:
Leave me out of it. They don't count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE ~ Tom Stoppard

Sunnybrook Farm is now a parking lot; the petticoats are in the garbage can, where they belong in the modern world; and I detest censorship. ~ Shirley Temple

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson II

Totalitarian rule thrives on its subjects' ignorance of the extent to which the surveillance system is monitoring their lives. The possibility, rather than the fact, of surveillance is enough to generate fear, anxiety, and informal pressures to conform, to downplay dissenting opinions, to declare one's absolute loyalty. Thus an enforced culture of self-censorship emerges in communities that used to express their political opinions freely. ~ Arun Kundnani

The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. ~ Milos Forman

There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes - such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power - and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed. ~ Orlando Figes

Some of the choices teenagers make are morally and practically wrong. Some of my characters do things I hope my child won't. There are occasionally words my characters choose that I wouldn't utter in my mother's presence. But when I was sixteen, or twelve, hanging out with my friends? That was different. For a story to feel real, I have to respect what a character would really do or say. ~ Rachel Vail

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in
The mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man ... ~ Tom Lehrer

Calvin: Somewhere in Communist Russia I'll bet there's a little boy who has never known anything but censorship and oppression. But maybe he's heard of America, and he dreams of living in this land of freedom and opportunity! Someday, I'd like to meet that little boy ... and tell him the awful TRUTH ABOUT THIS PLACE!! Calvin's Dad: Calvin, be quiet and eat the stupid lima beans. ~ Bill Watterson

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing. ~ Penn Jillette

History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity. ~ Holbrook Jackson

The crucifixion should never be depicted. It is a horror to be veiled. ~ William Golding

the false innocence
you render for them
by censoring truth
protects only you ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

The only way to ensure that you and those you agree with have the right to speak is to support the right to speak of those you despise or do not like - the people with whom you do not agree. ~ Pamela Wallin

What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear. ~ Julian Assange

Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship. ~ Kenneth Tynan

When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers. ~ Paul Goodman

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literary censorship should not be necessary within the parameters of the law because it's simply a reflection of prevailing social prejudices!

Writing should challenge and change prevailing ideas - churning the guts and ruffling feathers of friends, family and society. Antagonizing is a product of open writing. Expecting less is resignation and stagnation that slides the art into the status-quo.

Writing needs the wider view that shows the causality of our prevailing social prejudice - and shakes at its foundation.

Writers spare us no less and please leave your praise and oppugn to Christopher Hitchens. ~ Jack Tar

[Confiscating a book and punishing its author] is a sign that one does not have a good case, or at least doesn't trust it enough to defend it with reasons and refute the objections. Some people even go so far as to consider prohibited or confiscated books to be the best ones of all, for the prohibition indicates that their authors wrote what they really thought rather than what they were supposed to think ... ~ Laszlo Radvanyi

It's truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisals, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

My biggest thing has always been privacy. With an interview such as this where the questions are about me, I struggle to express myself. I have an immediate answer in my head of what I'd say, but sometimes I feel that it would be too honest. So these wheels of censorship start going around my head. ~ Garrett Hedlund

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it. ~ Mae West

Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Books can be burned," croaked Black.
"They have a way of rising from the ashes," said Andreus. ~ James Thurber

Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs. ~ Glenn Greenwald

There's been an incredible censorship in America and throughout the world, but particularly in America where students aren't even allowed to critically think about evolution, the issue of origins; they are not allowed to hear other points of view; they are taught incorrectly about science and taught that evolution is fact. ~ Ken Ham

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950] ~ Harry Truman

Many bowdlerized versions indicated a Victorian-minded censorship, which feared that Little Red Riding Hood might some day break out, become a Bohemian, and live in the woods with the wolf. ~ Jack D. Zipes

Another view is Western companies chartered in societies that believe in this kind of censorship shouldn't be carrying water for societies that do. ~ Jonathan Zittrain

People don't often say what they think but rather what they think is permissible. ~ Michael Rectenwald

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.

In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?

But Mao's theory might just be the extension o ~ Jung Chang

The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science. ~ Julian Schwinger

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn't afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines. ~ Viv Albertine

Churchmen are quick to defend religious freedom; lawyers were never so universally aroused as by President Roosevelt's Court bill; newspapers are most alert to civil liberties when there is a hint of press censorship in the air. And educators become perturbed at every effort to curb academic freedom. But too seldom do all of these become militant when ostensibly the rights of only one group are threatened. They do not always react to the truism that when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes. ~ Earl Warren

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. ~ A.J. Liebling

We are in an era where censorship is creeping back in through the Patriot Act and where people are.. being intimidated not to speak about what we should be speaking about,. ~ Gerald Nicosia

To reach the pinnacle of your writings potential; productivity becomes obsolete. ~ Marston James

Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time. ~ Martin Baker

John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton's reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century. Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot's belief that "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry." Milton's radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations - particularly the Romantic movement - the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as "an acrimonious and surly republican" must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time. Source: Wikipedia ~ John Milton

Censors don't want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty. ~ Judy Blume

Self-censorship as a result of intimidation or social pressures, sometimes referred to as "political correctness", constitutes a serious obstacle to the proper functioning of democracy. It is important to hear the views of all persons,including the "silent majority", and to give heed to the weaker voices. ~ Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn't suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows

A sodomite got very excited looking at a zoology text. Does this make it pornography? ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing. ~ Fred Wilson

Those of us who oppose censorship believe that reading about something is a safe way to explore and understand it, and that it is the best way to prepare young people to deal with the issues they will face, both in school and later in life. It's true that some material is "offensive"--but to know how to respond to it, we need to understand it. ~ Joan Bertin

If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves. ~ Evan Osnos

Once when I felt a little bruised by censorship I sent through Herodotus's account of the battle of Salamis fought between the Greeks and Persians in 480 B.C., and since there were place names involved, albeit classical ones, the Navy censors killed the whole story. ~ John Steinbeck

China's censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

The question isn't whether or not to censor artists who espouse misogynistic views. The question is whether or not we support them as listeners and consumers. ~ Dessa Darling

No one willingly reverts to the past unless all his actions have passed his own censorship, which is never deceived. ~ Seneca.

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. ~ Theodore Schroeder

Political correctness is modern day censorship. This still doesn't justify you in being a douchebag. ~ Kevin Focke

One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship. ~ Bennett Cerf

There must be something in books, something we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. ~ Ray Bradbury

You cannot grant to universities the intellectual freedom that scholarship requires, it is argued, and also deny the moral freedom that enables students to adapt through their own "experiments in living." Freedom is indivisible, and without it knowledge cannot grow.
The problem with that argument is that, outside the natural sciences and a few solid humanities like philosophy and Egyptology, academic freedom is a thing of the past. What is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal, and censorship has become accepted as a legitimate part of the academic way of life. ~ Roger Scruton

Freedom of speech is detestable only to those who have no desire to think for themselves. ~ Criss Jami

The press is easier to strangle than to look in the eyes. ~ Winston Churchill

There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw. ~ Ayn Rand

I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them. ~ Lois Lowry

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools. ~ Evgeny Morozov

Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it. ~ Neil Postman

For some people, 'erudition' is nothing more than a vehicle for hostility and arrogance; 'good taste' merely an excuse for condescension--or worse, censorship -- Sadie ~ Alice Kimberly

Where the truth is censored, the truth grows fangs. ~ Marty Rubin

If your written words become literal nails to crucify you with, then you have done your job well. You provoked a reaction, whether it is positive or negative is irrelevant. Writing that evokes no reaction is a body without a soul. ~ Stewart Stafford

The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. ~ William H Gass

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship. ~ Irving Kristol

Our studies have shown that China's online censorship systems are by far the most sophisticated and extensive in the world. ~ John Palfrey

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. ~ Benjamin Franklin

I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves. ~ Peggy Noonan

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble. ~ Peter S. Jennison

The only thing that is obscene is censorship. ~ Craig Bruce

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak. ~ Salman Rushdie

There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like. ~ Lindy West

Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the Truth, unlesse ye first make yourselves that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true Liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formall, and slavish as ye found us, but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous as they were from whom ye have free'd us. ~ John Milton

When did it start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn book). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. ~ Ray Bradbury

This excerpt includes both a cautionary tale of being caught en flagrante and a stirring defense of getting fucked.

Redeeming social value, indeed. ~ Simon Sheppard

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. ~ Walt Whitman

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way. ~ Kathy Acker

Self-censorship, whether known or unknown, is an unwelcome brake on creativity; it stifles self-expression and hence prevents a work from reaching the heights of great art. ~ Semir Zeki

Words alone can rarely justify censorship. If we censor words themselves without looking at the context, we could shut down much of the entertainment industry. ~ Witold Walczak

Everyone has an opinion, and the guy screaming for censorship may be the next guy to have his ideas cut off. ~ Richard King

You may silence the critics, but you don't silence the pain. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

In China, the rules of the market are not always that transparent. So it's very hard. Also, the national TV networks are all owned by the government, so our shows are subject to censorship by the networks. Every now and then, we are told that certain subjects cannot be talked about. There are frustrations. ~ Yang Lan

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion. ~ James P. Hogan

It's a very teenage idea - this idea that thought is ruined when we give over to television shows and glossy magazines and what they are telling us to do. The alternative, I believe, in is pitiless censorship. Because we owe each other the best effort we can to see one another without that mediation. ~ John Maus

Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs. ~ Ronald Dworkin