quotations about censorship
When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Clash of Kings
Sometimes it’s a short step from banning to burning.
HOWARD ZINN
interview, Identity Theory, Jan. 10, 2001
Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you. The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader.
J. M. COETZEE
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship
The censorship itself, that's not the worst evil. The worst evil is -- and that's the product of censorship -- is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. I am stopping to being honest, I am becoming hypocrite -- and that's what they wanted, they wanted everybody to feel guilty.
MILOS FORMAN
interview, National Security Archive, January 18, 1997
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure way against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is freedom.
ALFRED WHITNEY GRISWOLD
address to students at Phillips Academy, Andover, New Hampshire, spring 1952
Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
PAUL GOODMAN
Growing Up Absurd
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
speech, June 1990
When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
EDWARD ALBEE
preface, The American Dream
The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.
ROBERT HEINLEIN
The Man Who Sold the Moon
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
GEORGE ORWELL
Why I Write
When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.
NICK COHEN
You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One's Own
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Long ago those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free. In the realm of expression they put their faith, for better or for worse, in the enlightened choice of the people, free from the interference of a policeman's intrusive thumb or a judge's heavy hand. So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance.
POTTER STEWART
dissenting opinion, Ginzburg et al v. United States, 1965
The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
speech, Jan. 20, 1935
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
LAURENCE J. PETER
Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time
To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor? Isn't a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what's fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched? Did you hear any speaker in the opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you -- relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you'd give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate", November 15, 2006
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 outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
E.M. FORSTER
Two Cheers for Democracy
Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
Speak
The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
radio broadcast to the United States and London, October 16, 1938
These destitute Censors are like a pack of mad dogs. When there is nothing for them to criticize, they will all go after a dead tiger like all the wasps coming out from a nest.
T.L. YANG
Officialdom Unmasked