Quotes on Censorship

There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.

In China, the problem is that with the system of censorship that's now in place, the user doesn't know to what extent, why, and under what authority there's been censorship. There's no way of appealing. There's no due process.

Don't censor yourself to comfort their ignorance.

If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.

Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.

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.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to believe in it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else— the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film or speaker banned because otherwise he himself might be harmed.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

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

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

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?

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