Censorship Quotes - Page 9

• The roots of copyright lie in censorship. It was easy for state and church to control thought by controlling the scribes, but then the printing press came along and the authorities worried that they couldn't control official thought as easily.

  Stephan Kinsella

  Lying, Roots, Church

  "Stephan Kinsella on the Logic of Libertarianism and Why Intellectual Property Doesn't Exist". Interview with Anthony Wile, www.thedailybell.com. March 18, 2012.

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• It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.

  William O. Douglas

  Attitude, Fate, Expression

  "The One Un-American Act". William O. Douglas' speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award, December 3, 1952.

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• There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

  Pauline Kael

  Movie, Believe, Thug

  "Stanley Strangelove". Review of "A Clockwork Orange" in January 1972. "Deeper into Movies". Book by Pauline Kael, www.visual-memory.co.uk. 1973.

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• It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship.

  Molly Ivins

  Girl, Children, Book

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• Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Fashion, Atheist, Freedom

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• If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

  Frederick Douglass

  Wisdom, Freedom, Rain

  Frederick Douglass (2014). “Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings”, p.42, Courier Corporation

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• Censorship' is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one's own antagonists.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Agency, Silence

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.85, Penguin

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

  Nadine Gordimer

  Literature, May

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.357, A&C Black

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• The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

  Michael Kimmelman

  Freedom, War, Artist

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• I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual and moral cowards.

  William Borah

  Intellectual, Coward, Looks

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• Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

  Alfred Whitney Griswold

  Book, Ideas, Jail

  "Quora: What Does Freedom of Speech Mean?". www.yahoo.com. May 13, 2017.

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• Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Fashion, Book, College

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Time, Book

  Sigmund Freud (2016). “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (Annotated)”, p.18, Sigmund Freud

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• If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

  Winston Smith

  Party, Past, Hands

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• Joe Lieberman was threatening censorship. What I'm arguing is that if the creative people in Hollywood themselves have a responsibility, have a moral responsibility in terms of smoking, not to show smoking in movies.

  Joe Eszterhas

  Responsibility, People, Smoking

  Interview with Dominic Bellone, www.nbcnews.com. October 9, 2002.

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• Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.

  Charles Bradlaugh

  Freedom Of Speech, Abuse, Censorship In Books

  Charles Bradlaugh's speech at Hall of Science (circa 1880), as quoted in Annie Besant "Annie Besant: An Autobiography", 1893.

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• This is precisely the purpose of censorship - not only to block unwanted views, but to keep people who are unhappy from knowing how many millions of others share their unhappiness; to keep the dormant opposition from awakening to its own developing strength.

  Hedrick Smith

  Block, Views, Knowing

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• The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Jobs, Men, Erring

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• Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Mother, Metaphor

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• They cant censor the gleam in my eye.

  Charles Laughton

  Eye, Gleam, Cant

  1934 Of his role of Mr Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

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• 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. And I think a lot of these young kids are going
  to have to learn the hard way before they realize that you can actually do some damage if you're being careless or frivolous in what you're saying.

  Tom Petty

  Believe, Responsibility, Kids

  "Tom Petty Is Pissed". Rolling Stone, October 23, 2002.

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• The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.

  James T. Farrell

  Winning, Media, Degrees

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• People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  People, Kind, Participation

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• People call me for interviews on censorship type topics all the time, like that Gannette interview.I don't hold myself out to be an authority on it, but the reason they call me is that they know that I'll at least open my mouth, and give an opinion, whereas other people will play it safe, and won't say anything, because they don't want to offend anybody.

  Frank Zappa

  Play, People, Giving

  Source: afka.net

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• We live in far too permissive a society. Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are so badly lit!

  Woody Allen

  Film, Lit, Pornography

  Woody Allen (2007). “The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose”, Random House Incorporated

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