Top 100 Quotes About Censorship
#1. Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
Henry Steele Commager
#2. 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.
Bill Hicks
#3. We can speak our honest minds without compromise and without censorship and to each other and to our people. We can take our message directly to our people.
Glenn Miller
#4. When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.
David Leavitt
#5. I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.
Nelson Algren
#6. I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.
Peggy Noonan
#7. I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.
Henry Rollins
#8. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Ray Bradbury
#9. In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.
Albert Camus
#11. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut
#12. Another view is Western companies chartered in societies that believe in this kind of censorship shouldn't be carrying water for societies that do.
Jonathan Zittrain
#13. I always loved music, and I always wanted to make a film about it, but I could never do it because of the censorship that was around.
Bahman Ghobadi
#14. Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves.
Emma Stone
#15. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
John Milton
#16. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
Peter S. Jennison
#17. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.
Pat Conroy
#18. At CBS, I'm in your house. I'm mindful of that. When I do standup, you're in my home and I can say what I want to.
Craig Ferguson
#19. If we think to regulat Printing, thereby to rectifie manners, we must regulat all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightfull to Man.
John Milton
#20. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.
Yuval Noah Harari
#21. To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvetius
#22. The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
John Gilmore
#23. 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.
Pablo Picasso
#24. [Censors] rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.
John Milton
#25. The only thing that is obscene is censorship.
Craig Bruce
#26. I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician.
Federico Fellini
#28. I do not believe in censorship, but I believe we already have censorship in what is called marketing theory, namely the only information we get in mainstream media is for profit.
Sam Sheppard
#30. Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.
Michael Anti
#31. I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
Mae West
#32. To be clear, Goodreads staff have not been deleting any posts. A value we've always had here is that we don't censor content (unless it's against our policies - eg porn, etc). [April 1, 2013]
Otis Y. Chandler
#33. The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.
Evan Osnos
#34. Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#35. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.
G.K. Chesterton
#37. Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book ...
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#38. I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.
Vik Muniz
#39. Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Mark Twain
#40. China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.
John Palfrey
#41. Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway.
Germaine Greer
#42. If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.
Ice-T
#43. As a condition for entry into the Chinese market, Apple had to agree to the Chinese government's censorship criteria in vetting the content of all iPhone apps available for download on devices sold in mainland China.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#44. Our studies have shown that China's online censorship systems are by far the most sophisticated and extensive in the world.
John Palfrey
#45. When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'
Nick Cave
#46. I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.
Erica Jong
#47. Smoking is unhealthy but not as unhealthy as being forbidden to smoke.
Marty Rubin
#48. Even in societies where words are often strictly controlled, messages diverse never die. Resembling seeds scattered here and there, they find all manner of cracks and crevices to root.
William E. Jefferson
#49. Censorship in the schools that denies intellectual freedom to teachers robs the student of that same freedom. And the freedom to learn is clearly no less precious than the freedom to teach.
Sterling M. McMurrin
#50. Every Democrat constituency group has at least two things in common. They hate us. They despise opposition. That's why they created political correctness. Speech censorship. They hate opposition and they'll do anything they can to eliminate it.
Rush Limbaugh
#51. No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.
Oscar Wilde
#52. Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.
Phil Kerby
#53. Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#54. I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he's old enough to read it.
John Waters
#55. A safe and inclusive society is worthless if a person cannot speak their mind. Censorship and manufactured outrage are the problem and not the solution.
Carmine Savastano
#56. It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.
Adolf Hitler
#57. You should not be subjected to the pressures, the intimidation, whether by Government or by the private sector, which would force you into self-censorship.
Alfred-Maurice De Zayas
#58. Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
Eugene O'Neill
#59. You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.
Craig Ferguson
#60. Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship.
Ben Lindsey
#61. The artist, viewing his fellows through his personal vision, has through the ages attempted to portray what he sees and to present his understanding of it. Censorship in his case has perpetrated heavy and sometimes reprehensible blunders.
Hollis Alpert
#62. Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum.
David Letterman
#63. Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
Nadine Gordimer
#64. 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.
Tim Robbins
#65. Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.
George Carlin
#66. Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.
Evgeny Morozov
#67. Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.
Clare Boothe Luce
#68. I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.
Tom Petty
#70. 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.
Ai Weiwei
#71. The first thing dictators do is finish free press, to establish censorship. There is no doubt that a free press is the first enemy of dictatorship.
Fidel Castro
#72. Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.
Robert H. Jackson
#73. The language in which thought is embodied is the mere carcass of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work is too subtle for their authority.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#74. And although I'm all for freedom of expression and against censorship, there are certain things I'm not willing to go to jail for.
Tom Lehrer
#75. Once you get used to censorship, sometimes you self-censor.
Lucien Bourjeily
#76. Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.
Julian Assange
#77. It says a lot about Sandberg's brand of feminism that this campaign focuses on policing language rather than bringing attention to important issues that have real impact on women and girls
Jessica Roy
#78. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
#79. We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.
Philip Slater
#80. I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship.
Jeff Buckley
#81. The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.
Edith Hamilton
#82. The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
Tommy Smothers
#83. Censorship does not interfere with the constitutional rights of every American to sit alone in a dark room in the nude and cuss.
Pat Paulsen
#84. Iranian filmmakers are not passive. They fight whenever they can, as creative expression means a lot to them. The restrictions and censorship in Iran are a bit like the British weather: one day it's sunny, the next day it's raining. You just have to hope you walk out into the sunshine.
Asghar Farhadi
#85. Words alone can rarely justify censorship. If we censor words themselves without looking at the context, we could shut down much of the entertainment industry.
Witold Walczak
#86. For some people, 'erudition' is nothing more than a vehicle for hostility and arrogance; 'good taste' merely an excuse for condescension--or worse, censorship -- Sadie
Alice Kimberly
#87. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
#88. If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
Irving Kristol
#89. I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances
from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#90. The library has a robust collection of what I call non-cuddly hate lit. This is one of my favorite things about working here: If you believe censorship is poison, here lies paradise.
Josh Hanagarne
#91. The censorship is such on television in the U.S. that films like mine don't stand a chance.
John Pilger
#92. Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.
Kenneth Tynan
#93. SeLF censorsHIP?
Not my strong suit ... I dont want to be a total d o u c h e b a g , but a little bit of one.
Misha Collins
#94. There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
Virginia Postrel
#95. Where the truth is censored, the truth grows fangs.
Marty Rubin
#96. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#97. In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.
Tim Wu
#99. When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.
Kate Adie
#100. The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
D.H. Lawrence
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