Censorship Quotes - Page 19

• A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  Book, Blood, Purpose

  Penelope Fitzgerald (1978). “The Bookshop”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

  Freedom, Patriotic, Independent

  Adlai E. Stevenson's speech in Detroit, Michigan, October 7, 1952.

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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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• I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

  Dorothy Allison

  Heart, Character, Needs

  Dorothy Allison (2013). “Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature”, p.142, Open Road Media

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• As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.

  John Christopher

  Believe, People, Nonsense

  John Christopher (2013). “When the Tripods Came”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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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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• Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

  William O. Douglas

  Teaching, Rights In America, Political Revolution

  "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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• We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Book, Views, Exhibitions

  Theodore Dreiser (1920). “Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life”

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• We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Print

  Mark Twain (1994). “Mark Twain on the damned human race”

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• Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people; the [party] organization embraces within its scope only those who do not threaten on psychological grounds to become a brake on the further dissemination of ideas.

  Adolf Hitler

  Party, Organization, Ideas

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• Only the continuous and steady application of the methods for suppressing a doctrine, etc., makes it possible for a plan to succeed.

  Adolf Hitler

  Doctrine, Succeed, Etc

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• We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Book, Fighting, Men

  "Message to the Booksellers of America" (1942)

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• It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Law, Political, Mind

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• First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

  Anthony Kennedy

  Thinking, Government, Law

  Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234, 2002.

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• It's such an honour being banned in Italy, the mother of sensuality. It's like being asked to straighten your tie in a bordello... It's ironic that the pictures were removed on the complaint of a cardinal. I regard censorship as a cardinal sin.

  Harold Town

  Mother, Ties, Ironic

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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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• Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum.

  David Letterman

  Children, Gum, Problem

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• I always loved music, and I always wanted to make a film about it, but I could never do it because of the censorship that was around.

  Bahman Ghobadi

  Film, Wanted

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• It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

  Katharine Whitehorn

  Nice, Thinking, Miracle

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• The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.

  Katharine Whitehorn

  Running, Long, Cases

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• A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

  Erica Jong

  Book, Self, Centralization

  Erica Jong (1994). “The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller”, p.36, Grove Press

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• I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.

  Erica Jong

  Communication, Thinking, Evil

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

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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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