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Quotation of the day
Friday, 21 November 2008
Daily Quote:
"There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American." (Twain, Mark - America)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Censorship

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.
Art made tongue-tied by authority.
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.
Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.
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.
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
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.
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.
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
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.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
Instead of asking -- How much damage will the work in question bring about? why not ask -- How much good? How much joy?
It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.
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.
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.
No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.
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.
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.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
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.
The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
They can't censor the gleam in my eye.
This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.
Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.
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.
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.
When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.
Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.
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.
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?
You can cage the singer but not the song.
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

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