Quotes on Censorship

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

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

Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

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.

The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?

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

Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.

It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results

So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.

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.

The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.