44 Quotes On Censorship

In the intricate dance between freedom of expression and the regulation of ideas, censorship emerges as a powerful force shaping the narrative of society. Throughout history, intellectuals, writers, and thinkers have both decried and analyzed this ever-present phenomenon, offering profound insights into its impact on culture, creativity, and individual liberty. Our curated collection of the top 44 quotes on censorship aims to illuminate these perspectives, inviting readers to reflect on the delicate balance between safeguarding free speech and the imposition of silence. Delve into these thought-provoking statements that challenge and inspire, highlighting the timeless debate over who decides what should be heard and seen in our world.

1. “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

2. “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

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

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

5. “To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.” - Michel de Montaigne

6. “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

7. “A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.” - Laurence Peter

8. “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

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

10. “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” - Ray Bradbury

11. “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

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

13. “Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des AndersdenkendenFreedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.” - Rosa Luxemburg

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

15. “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

16. “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

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

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

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

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

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

22. “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

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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."[Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]” - Louis Brandeis

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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.” - Philip Pullman

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” - Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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