Censorship Quotes

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

Kurt Vonnegut

Art made tongue-tied by authority.

William Shakespeare

He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius.

William Gilmore Simms

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

George Bernard Shaw

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

Klemens Von Metternich

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder censorship, we call it concern for commercial viability.

David Mamet

We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue

D.W. (David Wark) Griffith

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Leonardo DaVinci

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Censor, n. An officer of certain governments, employed to supress the works of genius. Among the Romans the censor was an inspector of public morals, but the public morals of modern nations will not bear inspection.

Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Dev

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

George Bernard Shaw

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Sigmund Freud, Referring to the

The trouble with censors is that they worry if a girl has a cleavage; they ought to worry if she hasn

Marilyn Monroe

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

David Cronenberg

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. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure, which is useful, to praise which deceives them.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.

Clare Boothe Luce

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

Federico Fellini