Frank Zappa - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: censorship     


Dick Cavett - Quotes

 Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself. 

Tags: censorship   profanity     
Frank Zappa - Quotes

 I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner? 

Tags: censorship   floss   lyrics   teeth   zappa     


Christopher Hitchens - Quotes

 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 

Tags: atheism   bastille   bullying   censorship   demagogy   dictatorship   enlightenment   fascism   fatwa   friendship   hate   humor   individualism   intimidation   iran   irony   khomeini   literature   love   principles   religion   rushdie   stupidity   theocracy     
Lenny Bruce - Quotes

 If you can't say Fuck, you can't say, Fuck the government. 

Tags: censorship   fuck   government   profanity     
George Bernard Shaw - Quotes

 All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. 

Tags: censorship   progress     
Rosa Luxemburg - Quotes

 Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden



Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently. 

Tags: censorship   dissent   freedom   radical   rebel     
Christopher Hitchens - Quotes

 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 

Tags: albania   alcohol   alcoholism   antisemitism   astrology   astronomy   beijing   birth   birthdays   breastfeeding   britain   censorship   china   communism   corfu   czechoslovakia   damascus   diplomacy   gods   history   hitler   horoscopes   israel   jews   mars   nato   nazis   newspapers   nurember     
John Milton - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: books   censorship   ideas   intellect     
Ray Bradbury - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: censorship   reading   writing     
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Quotes

 Every burned book enlightens the world. 

Tags: censorship     
Ray Bradbury - Quotes

 There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. 

Tags: censorship     
Juvenal - Quotes

 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers? 

Tags: censorship     
Clare Boothe Luce - Quotes

 Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there. 

Tags: censorship     
Michel Foucault - Quotes

 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.  

Tags: censorship   foucault   history   philosophy     
Alberto Manguel - Quotes

 Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. 

Tags: books   censors   reader   readers     
Harry S Truman - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: censorship   politics     
Mark Twain - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: censorship   humor     
Salman Rushdie - Quotes

 What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. 

Tags: censorship     
Benjamin Franklin - Quotes

 If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. 

Tags: books   censorship   reading     
Michel de Montaigne - Quotes

 To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it. 

Tags: censorship     
George Bernard Shaw - Quotes

 Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads. 

Tags: books   censorship   reading     
Walt Whitman - Quotes

 The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. 

Tags: books   censorship     
Henry Steele Commager - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: censorship     
Kurt Vonnegut - Quotes

 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? 

Tags: censorship   freedom   writersblock   writing     
Salman Rushdie - Quotes

 Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence. 

Tags: censorship   freedom     
Dwight D. Eisenhower - Quotes

 Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book... 

Tags: books   censorship   freedom   libraries   reading   thought     
Heinrich Heine - Quotes

 Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. 

Tags: books   censorship     
Judy Blume - Quotes

 [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. 

Tags: books   censorship     
Eugene O'Neill - Quotes

 Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot. 

Tags: books   censorship     
Kurt Vonnegut - Quotes

 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! 

Tags: censorship   education     
Claude Adrien Helvetius - Quotes

 To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. 

Tags: books   censorship   reading     
Robert H. Jackson - Quotes

 Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so. 

Tags: censorship     
Laurence Sterne - Quotes

 Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail. 

Tags: censorship   reading   writing     
Joseph Brodsky - Quotes

 There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. 

Tags: books   censorship   reading     
Federico Fellini - Quotes

 Censorship is advertising paid by the government. 

Tags: censorship     
Claude Adrien Helvetius - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: books   censorship   press     
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Quotes

 Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. 

Tags: censorship     
Katherine Paterson - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: books   censorship   reading     
Alister Hardy - Quotes

 You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. 

Tags: censorship     
Holbrook Jackson - Quotes

 Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice. 

Tags: censorship     
Tony Hancock - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: books   censorship   hancock     
Granville Hicks - Quotes

 The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be....Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself. 

Tags: censorship     
Golda Meir - Quotes

 One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. 

Tags: censorship   history     


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