Censorship Quotes - Page 18

• If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.

  Vaclav Havel

  Country, Chains That Bind, Links

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• While I've found many of the religious shows I've viewed over the years not to be to my liking, or in line with my own beliefs, I've never considered it my place to exert any greater type of censorship than changing the channel, or better yet - turning off the TV completely.

  Bill Hicks

  Religious, Years, Freedom Of Speech

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• The artist, viewing his fellows through his personal vision, has through the ages attempted to portray what he sees and to present his understanding of it. Censorship in his case has perpetrated heavy and sometimes reprehensible blunders.

  Hollis Alpert

  Artist, Understanding, Vision

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• In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.

  Max Lerner

  Stupid, Character, Ethos

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• When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Choices, Silence, Silence Is

  Terry Tempest Williams (2012). “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice”, p.19, Macmillan

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• Calvin: Somewhere in Communist Russia, I'll bet there's a little boy who has never known anything but censorship and oppression. But maybe he's heard of America, and he dreams of living in this land of freedom and opportunity! Someday, I'd like to meet that little boy... and tell him the awful TRUTH ABOUT THIS PLACE!! Calvin's Dad: Calvin, be quiet and eat the stupid Lima beans.

  Bill Watterson

  Dream, Dad, Stupid

  "Calvin and Hobbes". Book by Bill Watterson, April 1987.

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• Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Children, Father, Ignorance

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• 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.

  Terry Pratchett

  Spring, Cutting, Thinking

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• We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.

  Ray Bradbury

  Watches, News, Tvs

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• To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water.

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Struggle, Water, Would Be

  Mikhail Bulgakov (1991). “Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, a Life in Letters and Diaries”, Harvill Press

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

  George Orwell

  Exercise, Marketing, News

  George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.124, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Children, Father, Book

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• Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognize it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship.

  Aryeh Neier

  Names, Political, Free Speech

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• Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Lying, Book, Thinking

  Remarks at Dartmouth College Commencement, Hanover, N.H., 14 June 1953

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• Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!

  Ray Bradbury

  Dog, Book, Cat

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• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

  James Madison

  Exercise, Secular Society, Law

  Virginia. General Assembly. House of Delegates, J. W. Randolph, James Madison (1850). “The Virginia Report of 1799-1800: Touching the Alien and Sedition Laws; Together with the Virginia Resolutions of December 21, 1798, Including the Debate and Proceedings Thereon in the House of Delegates of Virginia and Other Documents Illustrative of the Report and Resolutions”, p.136

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• You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him.

  John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn

  Freedom, Men, Political

  "On Compromise". Book by John Morley, 1874.

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• I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

  Bertrand Russell

  Attitude, Divorce, Catholic

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.34, Routledge

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• Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

  Ray Bradbury

  Song, Book, Reading

  Ray Bradbury (2012). “Fahrenheit 451: A Novel”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing.

  Fred Wilson

  Thinking, Speech, Good Things

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• 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.

  Wilbur Smith

  Thinking, Speak Your Mind, People

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

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• Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Lying, Self

  "I'm returning to India, deal with it - Salman Rushdie to NDTV". Interview with Barkha Dutt, www.ndtv.com. January 25, 2012.

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• Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

  Salman Rushdie

  Doing What You Want, Want, What You Want

  "On Censorship" by Salman Rushdie, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2012.

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• Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

  John Milton

  Freedom, Giving, Liberty

  'Areopagitica' (1644) p. 34

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• Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

  Lois Lowry

  Taken, Reality, Dangerous World

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