Popular quotes about Censorship! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I admire some of the people on the screen today, but most of them look like everybody else. In our day we had individuality. Pictures were more sophisticated. All this nudity is too excessive and it is getting very boring. It will be a shame if it upsets people so much that it brings on the need for censorship. I hate censorship. In the cinema there's no mystery. No privacy. And no sex, either. Most of the sex I've seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility towards sex.
Myrna LoyPeople were touchingly naive at the dawn of the Internet revolution when they said the Internet will route around censorship the way it routes around damage. With any revolution, the establishment catches up and figures out how to screw it up. The answer is to keep technology advancing fast enough so that those who would try to control it can't. It's up to people to defend what they care about. We shouldn't be complacent that this stuff is going to be a force for good.
Paul SaffoNow, tell me how you're going to teach the history of Jefferson, and cut out all those quotes and cut out all these facts, and cut out the key line of the Declaration of Independence: We are endowed by our Creator. I mean you have to have a conscious deliberate censorship of America, which is what the left and the courts and the classrooms has had for 40 years.
Newt GingrichUltimately, censorship comes down to taste. What offends me may enlighten you. Do you want me deciding-based on my taste-what you should or should not be exposed to?
Peter McWilliamsThere is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
John F. KennedyCensorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
Henry Steele CommagerWhat other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth.
Stephen FryMany novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.
Katie KitamuraMany great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan PamukI don't agree with most forms of censorship, and I especially don't agree with the idea that one needs to be from the same cultural, ethnic, or religious background as the subjects they portray in order to be qualified to portray those subjects. I believe that compassion and empathy should cross all of those category barriers, and the conversations art creates can be inflammatory initially, but I think are most often constructive and healing in the long run.
Shepard FaireyCensorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me.
Orhan PamukI have a really good idea of who my readers are and always write with a sensitivity to my audience. I use the F word when necessary, but there are words I won't use, mainly because I don't like them. I don't write about body parts when I write about sex. It's not about the physiological, it's more important for teens to read about the emotional aspects. I do think there are times when self-censorship is important.
Ellen HopkinsNothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.
Ali SmithPontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship
Ben LindseyThe world protested our invasion of Iraq, but the people of America were never made aware of that - through the censorship that goes on here, and believe me it's going on here.
Jesse VenturaThe US constitution's First Amendment rights only cover Americans, but I believe that in a democracy the competition of ideas and free speech should combat beliefs that it does not agree with - more speech and debate, not censorship.
Joichi ItoCalling 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.
Evgeny MorozovThere shouldn't be any censorship. This is America. There shouldn't be any of this freedom of the press, freedom of expression, but having said that, I think what's important is that people who make movies don't try to falsely lure people in to see the movie that don't want to be there. A kid should not see Evil Dead and we knew that.
Bruce CampbellWhen you have strict censorship of the internet, young students cannot receive a full education. Their view of the world is imbalanced. There can be no true discussion of the issues.
Ai WeiweiIt'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.
John Maus