Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of lan...
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion and if we were sure stifling it would be an evil still.
(n.) The office or power of a censor; as, to stand for a censorship.
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.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
Irreverence is our only sacred cow.
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.
No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
You're sad but you hold everything back...
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it f...
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.
I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memor...
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bri...