Censorship Quotes

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

~ Ronald Reagan

. . . I can see how the issue of exercising corporate control over users content is truly enraging here, on a site significantly made by these contributors. It’s unavoidable that we come to this, in my opinion (corporations always do), and GR/Amazon has all keys to the kingdom, but I can see why it’s so disappointing and enraging.Your content is theirs to do with as they please, their software works as they want, your choices are take it or leave it.The Internet is no longer for sharing (nor for porn!), it’s for corporations to exercise their control over users.

~ G.r. Reader

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.

~ Laurier Rochon

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

~ Rikki Ducornet

Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air! So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 2006; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose--oh, what a wailing!--and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More! And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and the shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists' Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at a fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'Curiouser and curioser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!

~ Ray Bradbury

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

~ Frank Zappa

[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric.

~ John Marshall Harlan

The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.

~ Bruce Coville

In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.

~ Milan Kundera

I curse when I get really upset. Letting off steam that way makes me feel a little bit better. I've been through a lot, but I have never had the urge to go postal. I thank fuck for that.

~ Oliver Markus Malloy

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 weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

~ Alfred Whitney Griswold

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.

~ Adolf Hitler

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.

~ Isaac Deutscher

When something needs to be said, I'll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet.

~ Elif Shafak

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

~ Salman Rushdie

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

~ Charles Bukowski

The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

~ Judy Blume

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

~ John Mortimer

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.

~ Noam Chomsky

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

~ Henry Louis Gates

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

~ John Perry Barlow

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

~ Federico Fellini

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

~ Clare Boothe Luce

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

~ Potter Stewart

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

~ Henry Steele Commager

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

~ Henry Steele Commager

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