Quotes on Censorship

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

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.

I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself.

Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.

Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Free speech not only lives, it rocks!

All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder._x000D_ _x000D_ For filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder._x000D_ _x000D_ When correctly viewed, everything is lewd._x000D_ _x000D_ I could tell you things about Peter Pan_x000D_ _x000D_ and the Wizard of OZ, there's a dirty old man!

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

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

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

Art made tongue-tied by authority.