70 Quotes About Censorship

In today's digital age, where information flows freely and ideas are shared across borders, the subject of censorship remains a contentious and highly debated issue. Whether motivated by political, cultural, or moral reasons, censorship has the power to shape societies and influence minds. To explore this complex topic, we've gathered a compelling collection of 70 quotes from thought leaders, writers, and activists who have pondered the implications of suppressing free expression. These thought-provoking quotes provide a nuanced look at the delicate balance between the need for regulation and the fundamental right to freedom of speech. Dive in and reflect on the diverse perspectives that highlight the intricate dance between control and liberty.

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. “To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.” - Claude Adrien Helvetius

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

4. “Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.” - Robert H. Jackson

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

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

7. “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

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. “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

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

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

13. “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

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

15. “It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.” - Alberto Manguel

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

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

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

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

20. “There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.” - Margaret Atwood

21. “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

22. “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

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

24. “So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.” - Kathy Griffin

25. “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

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

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

28. “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

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

30. “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

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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

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

36. “History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.” - Holbrook Jackson

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

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

48. “It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.” - Ray Bradbury

49. “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

50. “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

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

52. “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

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

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

55. “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

56. “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

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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “On things like censorship, I think everything should be allowed on television. You know, I mean anything. I don’t know who believes that anymore. Every left wing party says there should be some degree of censorship, that some things are bad taste. But it’s unjustifiable for anyone to decide what is bad taste.” - Richey Edwards

62. “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

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

64. “They told me I was not to draw.” - Mike Diana

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

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

67. “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

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

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

70. “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