Censorship Quotes - Page 5

• They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Inspirational, Happiness, Peace

  Benjamin Franklin, William-Temple Franklin (1818). “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of (the Same), Continued to the Time of His Death by William Temple Franklin. - London, H. Colburn 1818”, p.270

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• Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

  William Westmoreland

  Confused, Silly, Thinking

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• Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.

  William Hazlitt

  Nice, Noses, Filth

  William Hazlitt (1819). “Political essays, with sketches of public characters ...”, p.294

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

  Robert Cormier

  Boys, Years, Upset

  Interview with Lyn Gardner, www.theguardian.com. November 05, 2000.

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• I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Life, Tasks, Bars

  "The Struggle Intensifies". Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers' Congress (May 16, 1967) as translated in "Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record" edited by Leopold Labedz, 1970.

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• Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.

  Julian Assange

  Stopping, Form, Leaks

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

  Anatole France

  God, Government, Pseudonyms

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• Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

  William O. Douglas

  Literature, Moral, Should

  "Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. June 24, 1957.

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• 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.

  Tim Robbins

  Thinking, Self, Enemy

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• Free speech is life itself.

  Salman Rushdie

  Speech, Free Speech

  "Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor'". www.nytimes.com. December 12, 1991.

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• In any event, the proper question isn't what a journalist thinks is relevant but what his or her audience thinks is relevant. Denying people information they would find useful because you think they shouldn't find it useful is censorship, not journalism.

  Michael Kinsley

  Thinking, People, Events

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• Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship

  Ben Lindsey

  Jesus, Firsts, Christ

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• Burning is no answer.

  Camille Desmoulins

  Burning, Answers

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• Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.

  Sean O'Casey

  Christian, Knights, Order

  Sean O'Casey (1975). “The Letters of Sean O'Casey: 1955-58”, Catholic University of Amer Press

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• To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to 't.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Positive, Law Of Attraction, Mind

  "Montaigne's Essays: Top Essays".

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• I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

  William Butler Yeats

  Art, Thinking, Mankind

  Speech at Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate) on the Censorship of Films Bill, June 07, 1923.

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• The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

  John Stuart Mill

  Opportunity, Errors, Race

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.163, Hackett Publishing

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• Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts." This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.

  William O. Douglas

  Winning, Expression, Community

  "Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. June 24, 1957.

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• When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

  Edward Albee

  Judging, Matter, Morality

  EDWARD ALBEE (1961). “THE AMERICAN DREW THE ZOO STORY”

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• The censure of those who are opposed to us, is the highest commendation that can be given us.

  Charles de Saint-Evremond

  Given, Commendation, Censure

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• Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Hate, Civilization, Doe

  D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton (2000). “The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence”, p.414, Cambridge University Press

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• There was no censorship of the press: in general, the War Measures Act could have been made even more radical.

  Robert Bourassa

  War, Made, Radical

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• But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it.

  Robert Towne

  Children, Remember, Excellent

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• No member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.

  Samuel Johnson

  Doctrine, Members, Being True

  "The Table Talk of Dr. Johnson: Comprising Opinions and Anecdotes of Life and Literature, Men, Manners, and Morals".

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• 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

  Wisdom, Censorship In Books, Might

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