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.
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
(n.) The office or power of a censor; as, to stand for a censorship.
No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will.
Only the nonreader fears books.
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...
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, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.
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...
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.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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?
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...
You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.
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...
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody read.[As quoted in
You're sad but you hold everything back...
Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.