Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Censorship.
Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.
Thomas Bowdler
Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.
Sean O'Casey
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
Robert A. Heinlein, on censorshi
A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart, and his next to escape the censures of the world.
Joseph Addison
It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of ;antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.
The readiest and surest way to get rid of censure, is to correct ourselves.
Demosthenes
You can cage the singer but not the song.
Harry Belafonte
Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters -- because girls can read as well as boys -- reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?
Mervyn GriffithJones
One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want 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 banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed.
Edgar Dale
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
Arnold Bennett
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
They can't censor the gleam in my eye.
Charles Laughton
Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
Samuel Johnson, Rambler #2, Marc
The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.
James T. Farrell
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
William O. Douglas
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
You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
William Butler Yeats
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
Evelyn Waugh