Quotes about censorship

You can cage the singer but not the song.

— Harry Belafonte

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

— Arnold Bennett

Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.

— Thomas Bowdler

This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.

— British Board of Film

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

— Willa Cather

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

— David Cronenberg

One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else; the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed.

— Edgar Dale

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

— Anatole France

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

— Nadine Gordimer

Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters -- because girls can read as well as boys -- reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?

— Mervyn Griffith-Jones

We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue -- the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

— David Wark Griffiths

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Samuel Johnson

It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

— Samuel Johnson

They can't censor the gleam in my eye.

— Charles Laughton

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

— D. H. Lawrence

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

— Max Lerner

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder censorship, we call it concern for commercial viability.

— David Mamet

If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.

— Herman Melville

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

— Klemens Von Metternich

Instead of asking -- How much damage will the work in question bring about? why not ask -- How much good? How much joy?

— Henry Miller

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; 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

Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.

— Sean O'Casey

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

— Pablo Picasso

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

— Jacques Prevert

Art made tongue-tied by authority.

— William Shakespeare

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

— George Bernard Shaw

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

— Evelyn Waugh

Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.

— Mae West

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

— William Butler Yeats

I quit watching the debates after they excluded Ron Paul and censored supposedly live interviews with him from the tv.

— James Dye