119 Quotes On Censorship

Censorship, in its many forms, has been a contentious issue throughout history, shaping the way we access information and express ideas. While it clearly has a role in society, its implications spur debate and inspire strong opinions. In this article, we bring together a carefully curated selection of 119 thought-provoking quotes on censorship. These quotations, spanning centuries and cultures, illuminate various perspectives and provide insights into the complex relationship between freedom and control. Whether you are a staunch advocate for free speech or believe in the necessity of certain restrictions, these quotes will provoke thought and spark meaningful conversation.

1. “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.” - Jacques Derrida

2. “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962]” - John F. Kennedy

3. “Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

4. “manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)” - Mikhail Bulgakov

5. “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?” - Kurt Vonnegut

6. “[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” - Judy Blume

7. “Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

8. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” - Joseph Brodsky

9. “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. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.” - Henry Steele Commager

10. “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” - Benjamin Franklin

11. “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” - Heinrich Heine

12. “The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be....Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.” - Granville Hicks

13. “Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.” - Holbrook Jackson

14. “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'?” - Joseph Henry Jackson

15. “Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.” - Peter S. Jennison

16. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?” - Juvenal

17. “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.” - Clare Luce Booth

18. “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” - Golda Meir

19. “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” - John Morley

20. “Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.” - Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

21. “All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.” - Katherine Paterson

22. “Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.” - Salman Rushdie

23. “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” - Salman Rushdie

24. “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

25. “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]” - Harry S. Truman

26. “Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.” - Mark Twain

27. “All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!” - Kurt Vonnegut

28. “The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.” - Walt Whitman

29. “Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

30. “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” - Ray Bradbury

31. “If you can't say "Fuck" you can't say, "Fuck the government.” - Lenny Bruce

32. “[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]” - John F. Kennedy

33. “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.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]” - John F. Kennedy

34. “Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.” - Dick Cavett

35. “The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.” - Earl Warren

36. “A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.” - Robert A. Heinlein

37. “Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.” - Ray Bradbury

38. “Censorship is advertising paid by the government.” - Federico Fellini

39. “When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.” - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

40. “There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.” - Frank Zappa

41. “I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?” - Frank Zappa

42. “The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .” - Lemony Snicket

43. “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” - John Milton

44. “Irreverence is our only sacred cow.” - Paul Krassner

45. “I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.” - Peggy Noonan

46. “Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of.” - Christina Westover

47. “Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.” - Heywood Broun

48. “Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled...The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism that, it is argued, has finally been able to tear from man's eyes the shrouds imposed by mystical thought, religion, and such powerful illusions as freedom and dignity. Science has given us this great victory over ignorance. But, on closer examination, this victory too can be seen as an Orwellian triumph of an even higher ignorance: what we have gained is a new conformism, which permits us to say anything that can be said in the functional languages of instrumental reason, but forbids us to allude to...the living truth...so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its 'objective' manipulations, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality.” - Joseph Weizenbaum

49. “As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians cannot make informed decisions and incompetent or corrupt governments can be hidden under a cloak of secrecy.'When he became prime minister, his attitude appeared to undergo a shift of considerable proportions. It often took the Conservatives twice as long as previous governments to handle access requests. Sometimes it took six months to a year.” - Lawrence Martin

50. “As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.” - John Christopher

51. “At CBS, I’m in your house. I’m mindful of that. When I do standup, you’re in my home and I can say what I want to.” - Craig Ferguson

52. “You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.” - Craig Ferguson

53. “You clap. The Censor wakes up. We all get into trouble.” - Craig Ferguson

54. “To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.” - Claude Adrien Helvetius

55. “Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.” - Bruce Coville

56. “The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.” - Bruce Coville

57. “Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.” - Geraldine Brooks

58. “The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.” - Christopher Hitchens

59. “All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.” - George Orwell

60. “When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…” - Christopher Hitchens

61. “Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.” - Christopher Hitchens

62. “If the partridge didn't call at the wrong moment, Neither the hunter nor the falcon would know of it. It follows from this point also, That everyone's voice betrays him.” - Rahman Baba

63. “We change people through conversation, not through censorship.” - Jay-Z

64. “The delay in the application of the policy to books has several explanations. For one thing, Blackshirts were not, nor have they yet become, bookworms; and the intellectual bread of Mussolini himself is made, usually, of clippings. They did not care too much about things which they could not hate since they usually did not know them....” - Giuseppe Borgese

65. “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” - A.J. Liebling

66. “We appreciate your coming to us with a copy of your letter to your sister, but it was unnecessary. Your offense was known to us even before the letter's receipt by your sister. Effective as of September 15 the primary responsibility of our isle's new assistant chief postal inspector has been to scan all post for use of illegal letters of the alphabet, then to make nightly reports to the Council. A report has been put on file on your behalf, your official sentence to be forthwith in issuance.” - Mark Dunn

67. “They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.” - Ray Bradbury

68. “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.” - Anais Nin

69. “It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.” - Tony Hancock

70. “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 language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ” - Foucault Michel

71. “A large class of readers … will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletive with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares—what horror it conceals.” - Charlotte Brontë

72. “The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."[Beauharnais v.Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952) (dissenting)]” - William O. Douglas

73. “A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.” - Ellen Hopkins

74. “Only the nonreader fears books. ” - Richard Peck

75. “[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric.” - John Marshall Harlan

76. “The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.” - Tommy Smothers

77. “The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.” - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

78. “When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.” - David Leavitt

79. “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” - George Orwell

80. “All writers and their readers should stand up and voice their opposition to financial services companies censoring books. Authors should have the freedom to publish legal fiction, and readers should have the freedom to read what they want.” - Mark Coker

81. “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.” - Charles Bukowski

82. “You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.” - Chris Crutcher

83. “Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.” - David Davis

84. “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” - Mark Twain

85. “Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

86. “A word that turns up in TNR’s literary pieces is “tasteless. “ They use it in the same way you might reprove a toilet joke at the dinner table or around relatives. But with them it takes on moral weight. It’s a very damaging mistake: the idea that sniffing out the tasteless is the same as taste itself. It confuses censoriousness with a faculty of judgment that links the aesthetic to the moral sense.” - n+ 1 Magazine

87. “La historia no ha cambiado. Hace mil anos ellos eran los duenos del mundo. Hoy en dia lo siguen siendo. Claro, lo tienen que compartir con los grandes magnates de la tierra, esos que controlan el petroleo, las drogas, la tecnologia y por supuesto la television y la radio. La Iglesia domina los miedos y la promesa de la salvacion; las grandes empresas tambien manipulan los miedos y los paliativos para estos: la satisfaccion de las necesidades basicas - y las no tan basicas que hoy en dia parecen primordiales: carro, casa, belleza y entretenimiento - , una via directa al consimismo. Ambos en busca de lo mismo, la minipulacion del pueblo que los lleva a la gallina de los huevos de oro: el dinero de las masas. No es causalidad que la gente no quiera pensar. La Iglesia se encargo por siglos de esto, evitando la lectura de cualquier cosa que no fuese su religion. Desde Aristoteles, Ovidio, Pitagoras, Platon, Socrates, Antistenes, Heraclito, hasta Voltaire, Huxley, Hesse, Sade, Maquiavelo, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Dumas, entre otros, fueron censurados.” - Antonio Guadarrama

88. “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 memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.” - Martin Baker

89. “Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned.” - John Farndon

90. “If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.” - Chris Hedges

91. “Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.” - Lev Grossman

92. “I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don't believe in forbidden knowledge.” - Andrea Cremer

93. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.” - Ray Bradbury

94. “Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.” - Judy Blume

95. “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” - George R.R. Martin

96. “Too many adults wish to 'protect' teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.” - Margaret A. Edwards

97. “Poems are difficult to silence.” - Stephen Greenblatt

98. “The Motion Picture Association of America wipes the sweat off its brow and sings the PG-13 song.” - Bradley Sands

99. “It was a pleasure to burn.It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.” - Ray Bradbury

100. “We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They are like road maps that show us which way to go.” - Laura Bynum

101. “If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.” - Ice-T

102. “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 feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense? Yes. Yes. Stendahl felt his hands grow cold with the senseless anger.” - Ray Bradbury

103. “If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them."[Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992]” - Stephen King

104. “The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.” - Mark Twain

105. “It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."[I saw hate in a graveyard -- Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]” - Stephen Fry

106. “This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.” - Laurier Rochon

107. “... the Chinese have become very good at coming up with puns, alternative words, and memes. For example, they talk about the battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. The grass-mud horse, caonima, is the phonogram for "mother-fucker" - what the netizens call themselves. The river crab, hexie, is the phonogram for "harmonisation" or "censorship". So you have a battle between the caonima and the hexie. When big political stories happen, you find netizens discussing them using such weird phrases and words that you can't understand them even if you have a PhD in Chinese.” - Michael Anti

108. “Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.” - Michael Anti

109. “The crucifixion should never be depicted. It is a horror to be veiled.” - William Golding

110. “In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938]” - Mikhail Bulgakov

111. “For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)” - Margaret Bald

112. “Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)” - Margaret Bald

113. “Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.” - Glenn Greenwald

114. “Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.” - Ai Weiwei

115. “In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.” - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

116. “When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.” - Craig Nelson

117. “When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.” - Terry Tempest Williams

118. “There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.” - Bernard Malamud

119. “Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was.” - Krzysztof Kieslowski