Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Censorship.
When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.
Criss Jami
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience
Mark Twain
The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
Christopher Hitchens
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.
George Bernard Shaw, Preface to
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
Robertson Davies
When the telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's , I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.
George Orwell
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.
Jacques Prevert
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.
Herman Melville
Instead of asking -- How much damage will the work in question bring about? why not ask -- How much good? How much joy?
Henry Miller
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Jonathan Swift
No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.
Samuel Johnson
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.
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
John Milton
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
I quit watching the debates after they excluded Ron Paul and censored supposedly live interviews with him from the tv.
James Dye
