81 Quotes On Censorship'S Impact

Censorship has long been a contentious topic, navigating the delicate balance between freedom of expression and societal norms. In an age where information flows more freely than ever before, understanding the profound impacts of censorship on communication, culture, and individual thought becomes increasingly vital. A curated collection of 81 impactful quotes invites us to explore diverse perspectives on the influence of censorship throughout history and its implications in modern society. These reflections, captured through the words of authors, activists, thinkers, and leaders, offer valuable insights into the power dynamics at play and the universal quest for truth and transparency. Join us as we delve into these thought-provoking quotes, each shedding light on the multifaceted nature of censorship and its enduring imprint on our world.

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

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

3. “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

4. “[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

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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

10. “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

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

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

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

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

15. “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

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

17. “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

18. “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

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

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

21. “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

22. “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

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

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

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

26. “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

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

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

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

30. “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

31. “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

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

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

34. “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

35. “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

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

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

38. “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

39. “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

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

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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

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

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

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

51. “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

52. “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

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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

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

59. “And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.” - Ray Bradbury

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

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

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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

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

78. “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

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

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

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