Quotes About Censorship

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to believe in it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else— the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film or speaker banned because otherwise he himself might be harmed.

The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness.

If politically infused music is denied airplay, music reviews or festival stage time because it is considered "politics" rather than "art", then there will be no music left to ban. It will never reach the surface anyway, not to the larger audience. I believe that there is a high degree of censorship in the west, most importantly in the form of self-censorship among musicians themselves. This is why what you hear on the radio is - increasingly often - pure and toothless entertainment. Almost by definition, there's nothing left in pop music worth banning.

... censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books--with one hand.

Quite frankly, I think political correctness is the worst form of censorship. You're not allowed to speak your mind unless you're black, or unless you're a terrorist, or unless you're an Arab or a minority people. Then you can say what you like. But if you are like a lot of us you are not supposed to say certain things.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.

In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue ... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.

Political correctness is neither political nor is it correct. It amounts to social censorship, and the sooner we spit it out, the better.

Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.

One thing that success has taught me is censorship.

The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?

I don't approve of censorship. I like the French theatre idea. Put on the play, and if the audience doesn't care for it, or feels offended by it, they rip up the seats.

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself.

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. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

When 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.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.

When I published my first work, I thought I would never be able to go back to Lebanon. I thought they'd arrest me at the airport. I thought I would change literature as we know it. I thought I'd have men lining up at my door wanting to be my boyfriend. But later I discovered that no one read the book. Or no one cared. Right now, I have only one book translated into Arabic. Someday, maybe if the Syrian regime falls, there will be others, but probably another regime will come into power and it will employ just as much censorship.

[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep.

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

Nothing threatens freedom of the personality and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man (the "gray mass," to use the cynical term of bourgeois prognosticators) by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship.

It's a very teenage idea - this idea that thought is ruined when we give over to television shows and glossy magazines and what they are telling us to do. The alternative, I believe, in is pitiless censorship. Because we owe each other the best effort we can to see one another without that mediation.

I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.

The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred it replaces old prejudices with new one. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits. What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship.