Censorship Quotes - Page 20

• Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

  John Waters

  Agents, Whole Life, Has Beens

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• Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them.

  Ronald Dworkin

  Freedom, Mean, Power

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• Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs.

  Ronald Dworkin

  Simple, Names, Issues

  "Pornography: An Exchange". Ronald Dworkin's reply to "Women and Pornography" by Catherine A. MacKinnon, New York Review of Books, Volume 41, No. 5, www.nybooks.com. March 3, 1994.

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• Aside from the collective gain that comes from that free interchange of ideas, there is a direct personal value for the individual concerned. Each of us should have the right to speak his thoughts and to hear the thoughts of others.

  Charles Rembar

  Ideas, Should Have, Gains

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• [T]he German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul.

  Israel Zangwill

  Book, Soul, Pins

  Israel Zangwill (1908). “Dreamers of the Ghetto”, p.560, Library of Alexandria

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• To reject the word is to reject the human search.

  Max Lerner

  Censorship In Books, Censoring Books, Purging

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

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• Access to the outside world is preventing more censorship. I do think information flow is happening in China. .. There's no doubt in my mind that it's been a huge plus.

  Bill Gates

  Thinking, Information Flow, Mind

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• Churchmen are quick to defend religious freedom; lawyers were never so universally aroused as by President Roosevelt's Court bill; newspapers are most alert to civil liberties when there is a hint of press censorship in the air. And educators become perturbed at every effort to curb academic freedom. But too seldom do all of these become militant when ostensibly the rights of only one group are threatened. They do not always react to the truism that when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes.

  Earl Warren

  Religious, Rights, Air

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• A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

  Erica Jong

  Lasts, Firsts, Morality

  Erica Jong (2007). “What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong”, p.86, Penguin

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• There's hardly any governmental censorship in Korea.

  Bong Joon-ho

  Korea

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• I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

  Alan Furst

  Office, Brain, Want

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• I think (the internet) is contributing to Chinese political engagement..access to the outside world is preventing more censorship.

  Bill Gates

  Thinking, Political, Chinese

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• Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden

  Karl Kraus

  Satire, Forbidden

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• Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.

  Pope Leo XIII

  Book, Religion, Foundation

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• Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

  George Will

  Passion, Speech, Absence

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• If you voluntarily label a product as being unsuitable for kids and then turn around and market it directly to kids in contradiction of your ratings system, then you should be held accountable just like any other company in America that misleads consumers. That's not censorship. That's common sense.

  Joe Lieberman

  Kids, America, Common Sense

  "Bill seeks to end marketing adult music to children" by Dana Bash, www.cnn.com. April 26, 2001.

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• Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

  Julian Assange

  Self, People, Surveillance

  "Julian Assange: The Byline Interviews, Part One – ‘The God of Mass Surveillance". Interview with Seung-yoon Lee, www.byline.com. June 11, 2015.

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• I am not asking for government censorship or any other kind of censorship. I am asking whether a kind of censorship already exists when the news that forty million Americans receive each night is determined by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers and filtered through a handful of commentators who admit to their own set of biases.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Night, Men, News

  John R. Coyne, Spiro T. Agnew (1972). “The Impudent Snobs: Agnew Vs. the Intellectual Establishment”, New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House

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• The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.

  Salman Rushdie

  Death, People, Imagination

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• But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

  Rebecca West

  Book, Artist, Punishment

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• Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway.

  Germaine Greer

  Integrity, Survival, Principles

  Germaine Greer (1990). “The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings”, p.15, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• Our studies have shown that China's online censorship systems are by far the most sophisticated and extensive in the world.

  John Palfrey

  World, Study, Sophisticated

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• Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.

  Neil Postman

  Mistake, Believe, Political

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• Sunnybrook Farm is now a parking lot; the petticoats are in the garbage can, where they belong in the modern world; and I detest censorship.

  Shirley Temple

  Garbage Cans, World, Modern

  "Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women". Book by Bill Adler, February 23, 2001.

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• Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Genius, Fragments, Joyce

  Nadine Gordimer (2011). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.411, A&C Black

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