36 Quotes About Censorship

Jan. 11, 2025, 2:45 a.m.

36 Quotes About Censorship

In an era where information flows faster and wider than ever before, the conversation surrounding censorship becomes increasingly significant. Whether it's in the realm of literature, art, social media, or journalism, censorship holds the power to shape narratives and influence societies. Delve into a carefully selected collection of 36 insightful quotes that explore the nuances of censorship. These quotes span different perspectives and historical contexts, inviting you to reflect on the complex balance between freedom of expression and the desire to protect society. As you explore these quotations, consider the ways censorship impacts your own world, challenging and inspiring action and thought.

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

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

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

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

5. “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

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

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

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

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

10. “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

11. “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

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

13. “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

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

15. “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

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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water.” - Mikhail Bulgakov

21. “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

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

23. “The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.” - Anne Fadiman

24. “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

25. “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

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

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

28. “We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.” - Ray Bradbury

29. “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

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

31. “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

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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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