quotations about censorship
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
RAY BRADBURY
coda, Fahrenheit 451: A Novel
I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.
TOM PETTY
interview, Oct. 23, 2002
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
attributed, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.
CLARE BOOTHE LUCE
attributed, Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue ... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.
J.M. COETZEE
Giving Offense
The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored.
ROBERT H. JACKSON
American Communications Association v. Douds
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
J.M. COETZEE
Giving Offense
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder “censorship,” we call it “concern for commercial viability.”
DAVID MAMET
Writing in Restaurants
I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Nicolas Gouin Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, April 19, 1814
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
TOMMY SMOTHERS
attributed, Quote Unquote