Censorship Quotes

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" a...

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of ...

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is inca...

Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one?A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty ...

The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers suc...

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely d...

[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the c

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philoso...

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more ...

[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they ...

[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric.

Knowledge cannot defile nor consequently the books if the will and conscience be not defiled.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active a...

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitiv...

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

1. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the things they read (or watch, or listen to, or tast...

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion and if we we...

I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read...

The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers w...

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an a...

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave m...

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. ...

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken ...

So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.

For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or...

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought ...

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one c...

If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie...

They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words,...

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experie...

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted i...

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolut...

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in ord...

In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, an...

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by ...

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that af...

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying inte...

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's fathe...

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more mino...

It was a pleasure to burn.It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and...

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning hous...

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to star...

How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera...

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way ...

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be sho...

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wa...

Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des AndersdenkendenFreedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for t...

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature...

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secul...

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free peo...

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

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certai...

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certai...

Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always...

I am mortified to be told that in the United States of America the sale of a book can become a sub...

No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to ...

It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've...

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juve...

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down...

In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though...

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the ce...

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was t...

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract fil...

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, th...

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from other...

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the...

Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we we...

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal m...

Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faint...

Censorship like charity should begin at home but unlike charity it should end there.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.

To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inh...

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inha...

You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.

At CBS, I’m in your house. I’m mindful of that. When I do standup, you’re in my home and I can say w...

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of...

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that ...

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a n...

The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression ...

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always ...

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan...

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American ar...