CENSORSHIP QUOTES II

quotations about censorship

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Art made tongue-tied by authority.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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Censors are dead men
set up to judge between life and death.
For no live, sunny man would be a censor,
he'd just laugh.

D. H. LAWRENCE

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Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ

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Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

WILLIAM WESTMORELAND

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Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

JOHN MILTON

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The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

JOHN GILMORE

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Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

DICK CAVETT

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But however vigilant this censorship may be, even if the State were to take into its own hands exclusively education and all the instruction of the people, as Mazzini wished to do, and as Marx wishes to do to-day, the State can never be sure that prohibited and dangerous thoughts may not slip in and be smuggled somehow into the consciousness of the population that it governs. Forbidden fruit has such an attraction for men, and the demon of revolt, that eternal enemy of the State, awakens so easily, in their hearts when they are not sufficiently stupefied, that neither this education nor this instruction, nor even the censorship, sufficiently guarantee the tranquillity of the State. It must still have a police, devoted agents who watch over and direct, secretly and unobtrusively, the current of the peoples' opinions and passions.

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN

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Come out from the darkness of ignorance
The dirt ridden stench of censorship
Come out from the darkness of ignorance
This dirt ridden stench is choking me

LOCK UP

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The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.

TATYANA TOLSTAYA

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Censorship is like an appendix. When inert, it is useless; when active it is extremely dangerous.

MAURICE EDELMAN

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While people are always quick to take up the cudgels against censorship of the press, or radio, any crackpot can advocate new forms of censorship for the movies, and not a voice is lifted in protest. There's something illogical about this indifference to censorship of the movies. After all, it's just as much a medium of public expression as are the radio and newspapers.

HUMPHREY BOGART

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Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants.... Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all--except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

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I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.

WOODROW WILSON

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

HEYWOOD BROUN

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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 the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

RAY BRADBURY

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The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

ANAÏS NIN

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The vast number of titles which are published each year--all of them are to the good, even if some of them may annoy or even repel us for a time. For none of us would trade freedom of expression and of ideas for the narrowness of the public censor.

HUBERT HUMPHREY

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All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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