Censorship Quotes

Most popular censorship quotes


freedom freedom of speech

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.


Censorship made me.
Censorship is the height of vanity.
Every burned book or house enlightens the world.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Censorship is to art what lynching is to justice.
Burn the libraries, for all their value is in the koran.
Wherever books will be burned, men also, will be burned.
The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

government media

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.

freedom freedom of speech

To portray only what you would like to be true is the beginning of censorship.
Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with delusion.
Censorship is more depriving and corrupting than anything pornography can produce.


We can't duck our responsibilities" and permit the Government to subsidize "slime and sleaze.
Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.
Some have said that the strongest drive is not love or hate, but the drive to censor another's opinions.
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [pornography] . . . but I know it when I see it.
Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.
As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.
Censorship and democracy Don't mix, and there is no argument in favor or censorship that does not assume an antidemocratic social tendency.
However rationalized it may be censorship is always an attack on human intelligence and imagination and is always a sign of weakness, not strength, in those who enforce it.
The punishment of wits enhances their authority, and a forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced—writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices—and all because of fear.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance,  In the present, amidst dangers whose outcomes we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
For better or worse, editing is what editors are for: and editing is selection and choice of material. That editors-newspaper or broadcast-can and do abuse this power is beyond doubt, but that is not reason to deny the discretion Congress provided.
Personally, I don't like pornography. But not because I fear that 'it will turn me or someone else into a raging fiend. I dislike it because? it is tasteless, embarrassing and boring. But that's no reason to ban jt If being tasteless or embarrassing pr boring were a crime, we'd have to get rid of 90 of the TV shows and hit records, close down most of.the franchise food joints, muzzle the politicians, and prohibit ..any preacher from talking more than 90 seconds.
I am ... mortified to be told that, in the United States of America ... a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? And are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? ... Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not.