Quotes on Censorship

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

Censorship is saying: "I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine." But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word – even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

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.

The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.

While I've found many of the religious shows I've viewed over the years not to be to my liking, or in line with my own beliefs, I've never considered it my place to exert any greater type of censorship than changing the channel, or better yet - turning off the TV completely.

Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognize it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

It seems now that the place where you see_x000D_ the most obvious censorship is on college campuses --_x000D_ the precise place where you would expect to see the least.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

No member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.

Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas. - Censure acquits the raven, but pursues the dove.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

We change people through conversation, not through censorship.

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.