Censorship quotes:

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Censorship is advertising paid by the government. -- Federico Fellini
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads. -- George Bernard Shaw
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. -- William Westmoreland
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there. -- Clare Boothe Luce
A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to. -- Laurence J. Peter
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship. -- Nadine Gordimer
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. -- Walt Whitman
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. -- George Bernard Shaw
I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it. -- Mae West
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. -- Salman Rushdie
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. -- Mark Twain
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. -- Golda Meir
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
Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'? -- Joseph Henry Jackson
Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important. -- Mae West
Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear. -- Judy Blume
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. -- George Bernard Shaw
Censorship is the height of vanity. -- Martha Graham
Censorship is the mother of metaphor. -- Jorge Luis Borges
Censorship defeats the right to self determination. -- Billy Forbes
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. -- George Bernard Shaw
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. -- Henry Louis Gates
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. -- Potter Stewart
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. -- Henry Louis Gates
Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life. -- John Waters
Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate. -- Alice Mattison
Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. -- Laurie Halse Anderson
Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself. -- Dick Cavett
Censorship, telling people how to live their lives I completely disagree with. -- M. Shadows
Censorship has kind of disappeared in a way because everything is accessible online. -- Cliff Martinez
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. -- George Bernard Shaw
Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves. -- Emma Stone
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too. -- Voltaire
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there. -- Clare Boothe Luce
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide. -- Rebecca West
Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices. -- George Carlin
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. -- Benjamin Franklin
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. -- Nadine Gordimer
Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission. -- Arnold Bennett
Censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration. -- G. D. H. Cole
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will. -- Thomas Jefferson
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. -- Charles Bukowski
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice. -- John Osborne
I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it's not censorship. -- Penn Jillette
Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing. -- Michael Berryman
Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me. -- Orhan Pamuk
Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech. -- Alan Dershowitz
Censorship does not interfere with the constitutional rights of every American to sit alone in a dark room in the nude and cuss. -- Pat Paulsen
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. -- Henry Steele Commager
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion." -- Henry Steele Commager
We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line. -- Langston Hughes
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. -- Nadine Gordimer
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. -- Nadine Gordimer
Censorship, I believe, is the most dangerous enemy to all human communication, and piety of intention is probably the most dangerous, the most virulent and the most self-satisfying. -- Chuck Jones
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Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum. -- David Letterman
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it. -- Salman Rushdie
Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature) -- Margaret Bald
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
The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself. -- Granville Hicks
The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be....Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself. -- Granville Hicks
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read."[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)] -- George Bernard Shaw
For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature) -- Margaret Bald
Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think. -- Julian Assange
The artist, viewing his fellows through his personal vision, has through the ages attempted to portray what he sees and to present his understanding of it. Censorship in his case has perpetrated heavy and sometimes reprehensible blunders. -- Hollis Alpert
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task. -- J. M. Coetzee
The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression. -- Michael Kimmelman
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Art exhibitions would be less censored if they were rated, G or NC-17, like movies. People in general see galleries and museums as family-appropriate excursions. Censorship is a provided system which caters to lazy parenting, which is publicly-funded and socially accepted. -- Adamo Macri
Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission. -- Robert Anton Wilson
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. -- Tommy Smothers
Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all. -- Lois Lowry
Redeeming social value, indeed. -- Simon Sheppard
Only the nonreader fears books. -- Richard Peck
Poems are difficult to silence. -- Stephen Greenblatt
Irreverence is our only sacred cow. -- Paul Krassner
You're sad but you hold everything back... -- Donna Lynn Hope
The punishing of wits enhances their authority. -- Francis Bacon
They told me I was not to draw. -- Mike Diana
We change people through conversation, not through censorship. -- Jay-Z
Self-censorship is the most insidious form of censorship. -- Marty Rubin
Where the truth is censored, the truth grows fangs. -- Marty Rubin
Where the truth is censored, the truth grows claws. -- Marty Rubin
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading. -- Isaac Asimov
As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense. -- John Christopher
Only a free hand can draw a free line. -- Marty Rubin
In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life. -- Lynne Sharon Schwartz
I can't write this book. It's not politically correct yet -- Bangambiki Habyarimana
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers? -- Juvenal
To reach the pinnacle of your writings potential; productivity becomes obsolete. -- Marston James
Political correctness is euphemism for "fear to speak truth to authority -- Bangambiki Habyarimana
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind -- Gen William C. Westmoreland
The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression. -- Earl Warren
There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy. -- Margaret Atwood
A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill. -- Robert A. Heinlein
You clap. The Censor wakes up. We all get into trouble. -- Craig Ferguson
Some books can only be written when winners turn into loosers -- Bangambiki Habyarimana
You have to be mad in the language you're mad in. -- Chris Crutcher
Let me be clear: I am not an advocate of censorship. -- Mike Rogers
If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government. -- Lenny Bruce
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. -- A. J. Liebling
When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie. -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. -- John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. -- Heinrich Heine
I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much. -- Henry Rollins
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written. -- Jacques Derrida
There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them. -- Bernard Malamud
Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas. -- Pete Hautman
Smoking is unhealthy but not as unhealthy as being forbidden to smoke. -- Marty Rubin
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it. -- Michel de Montaigne
The crucifixion should never be depicted. It is a horror to be veiled. -- William Golding
Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one. -- Ai Weiwei
I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner? -- Frank Zappa
There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility. -- Steven Spielberg
So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it. -- Kathy Griffin
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. -- Joseph Brodsky
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves. -- Geraldine Brooks
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. -- George Orwell
If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut. -- Ice T

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