Censorship Quotes

A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.

~ Ellen Hopkins

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

~ Katherine Paterson

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

~ Eugene O'neill

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

~ Isaac Asimov

Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?

~ Joseph Henry Jackson

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

~ Laurence J. Peter

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

~ Walt Whitman

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

~ Geraldine Brooks

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

~ Alberto Manguel

To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

~ Claude Adrien Helvétius

History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.

~ Holbrook Jackson

It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.

~ Tony Hancock

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They are like road maps that show us which way to go.

~ Laura Bynum

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Are we to deny our daughters the works of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck or Shakespeare?....Where is the equality in banning girls from enjoying wonderful works of literature?....What kind of society defines suitable reading material by sex? This is indefensible censorship encouraging ignorance and bias. [About Caitlin Moran's statement.]

~ Diane Davies

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

~ Anaïs Nin

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

~ Ray Bradbury

They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned.

~ Marjane Satrapi

Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.

~ Suzy Kassem

Although censorship from others is not acceptable, you practice it every day when you decide with what people you will share what information, otherwise our deepest feelings would be shared with all the wrong people.

~ D.s. Mixell

The internet has become a carefully controlled and heavily monitored illusion. It has turned into both a circus and battleground. Popularity is rigged and can be bought. Censorship is in full effect. Popular opinion is fabricated, and the perception of a viewpoint's popularity is typically orchestrated and manipulated by legions of paid trolls. If you want to know the truth about somebody's true popularity and influence, look to the streets. If you want to know if a person is really guilty or innocent, study the facts yourself. Never judge anybody based on what you see or read on the internet. Information can easily be manipulated by the push of a few buttons.

~ Suzy Kassem

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

~ Salman Rushdie

Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des AndersdenkendenFreedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.

~ Rosa Luxemburg

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I once had a mind of quicksand,That dragged ideas into its depths,Inhaling specks of sunlight,Every time I drew a breath,But the world thought me a hazard,When every word I spoke, I meant,So around me they put caution tape,And filled me with cement.

~ Erin Hanson

Censorship is alive and well in America.

~ Suzy Kassem

Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to Don Quixote—have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine. Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy soul is thine own and thy will as free as any man's, whate'er he be, thou art in thine own house and master of it as much as the king of his taxes and thou knowest the common saying, Under my cloak I kill the king; all which exempts and frees thee from every consideration and obligation, and thou canst say what thou wilt of the story without fear of being abused for any ill or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of it.

~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking

~ Stephen Fry

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in

~ Harry Truman

If truth is not to be spoken, Sir, in a government, calling itself free, least it should be understood by the people, who are governed; and prevent their freely supplying the oil, that facilitates the movement of the cumbrous machine—If facts, which cannot be denied, be repressed; and reason, which cannot be controverted, be stifled; the time is not far distant, when such a country may say, adieu liberty!

~ Charlotte Turner Smith

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art.

~ Azar Nafisi

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he’s old enough to read it.

~ John Waters

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

~ Alberto Manguel

Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.

~ Richard Seaver

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

We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

~ Sergio Troncoso