Quotes on Censored

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

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

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

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

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

But we know that freedom cannot be served by the devices of the tyrant. As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedoms defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

Satire that the censor understands is rightly censored.