Quotes on Censoring

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

Art made tongue-tied by authority.

If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.

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

One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

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.

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

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.

The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

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

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.