Censor Quotes

1. "Muslims in the West and those in other intellectually free societies will be in a position to contribute to Islamic thought more so than those who are based in repressive environments where censorship and restriction on freedom still dominate thinking. The future development of Islamic thought may depend to a certain extent on the degree of intellectual freedom in Muslim societies."
Author: Abdullah Saeed

2. "Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror"
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

3. "It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love...the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian."
Author: Alice Munro

4. "Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper...It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed."
Author: Alison Bechdel

5. "Olvídate de que podrás alcanzar alguna vez lo que llaman "normalidad sexual", ni esperes que el amor te traiga paz. El sexo es el acto de las tinieblas y el enamoramiento la reunión de los tormentos. Nunca esperes que lograrás comprensión con el sexo opuesto. No hay nada más disímil ni menos dado a la reconciliación. Tú, practica el miedo, el rapto, la pugna, la violencia, la perversión y la vía anal, si crees que la satisfacción depende de la estrechez y de la posición predominante. Si deseas sustraerte a todo comercio sexual, aun mejor.Para el odio que te ha infectado el censor, no hay remedio mejor que el asesinato.Para la timidez, la autodestrucción."
Author: Andrés Caicedo

6. "I really have to edit myself - I need someone with a censor button around me all the time. I'm just a little unaware of what's deemed appropriate."
Author: Andy Dick

7. "I don't censor myself, but I don't want to force my sick-skewed version of the world, either."
Author: Bob Saget

8. "My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere."
Author: Chris Crutcher

9. "The Church doesn't censor. It tries to guide its faithful through catechism."
Author: Claudio Hummes

10. "The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression."
Author: Earl Warren

11. "Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully displayed it in public. It was those with moral values who could no longer freely walk in a public park without having to witness a revolting display.What happened to the public censors who protected the majority of citizenry from moral decadence? Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency? Did freedom mean anyone could do anything they wanted anytime they wanted, without consequences?"
Author: Francine Rivers

12. "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."
Author: George Bernard Shaw

13. "I can't censor myself; it's really important for me to say how I feel."
Author: Grimes

14. "Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard."
Author: Hélène Cixous

15. "Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
Author: Henry Steele Commager

16. "When you are trying to find your writing voice don't try to emulate any writer, not even your favorite. Sit quietly, listen, listen again, then listen some more and write out everything the voice says with no censoring – none – not one word."
Author: Jan Marquart

17. "In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner "censor."
Author: Jim Holt

18. "Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense."
Author: John Barton

19. "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."
Author: John Farndon

20. "I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print."
Author: John Mortimer

21. "The censorship is such on television in the U.S. that films like mine don't stand a chance."
Author: John Pilger

22. "Ewww... intelligent design people! They're just buck-toothed, Bible-pushing nincompoops with community-college degrees who're trying to sell a gussied-up creationism to a cretinous public! No need to address their concerns or respond to their arguments. They are Not Science. They are poopy-heads. There. I just saved you the trouble of reading 90 percent of the responses to the ID position... This is how losers act just before they lose: arrogant, self-satisfied, too important to be bothered with substantive refutation, and disdainful of their own faults... The only remaining question is whether Darwinism will exit gracefully, or whether it will go down biting, screaming, censoring, and denouncing to the bitter end.— Tech Central Station contributor Douglas Kern, 2005"
Author: Jonathan Wells

23. "Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled...The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism that, it is argued, has finally been able to tear from man's eyes the shrouds imposed by mystical thought, religion, and such powerful illusions as freedom and dignity. Science has given us this great victory over ignorance. But, on closer examination, this victory too can be seen as an Orwellian triumph of an even higher ignorance: what we have gained is a new conformism, which permits us to say anything that can be said in the functional languages of instrumental reason, but forbids us to allude to...the living truth...so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its 'objective' manipulations, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality."
Author: Joseph Weizenbaum

24. "Indeed, nothing less than the understanding of God's earth was in flux. For centuries, the church had censored scientific ideas that were contrary to Christian doctrine. When censorship ended, new questions flourished. For example, biblical scholars had long said with confidence that the world was about six thousand years old—that it had been created in six days, beginning at 9 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C. Then geologists showed that the world had been created over the course of eons. This in turn led to theories of evolution, to which Charles Darwin, in 1859, would add his theory of natural selection. Imagine living at a time of such discovery. Lincoln became a proponent of evolution."
Author: Joshua Wolf Shenk

25. "Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
Author: Judy Blume

26. "The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."
Author: Judy Blume

27. "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."
Author: Judy Blume

28. "What I find very attractive, what I find sexual, are people who are unapologetic for who they are and comfortable with themselves. And I think with those two things sexual energy does come out because you're not hovering or censoring yourself, you're just being who you are. And being who you are is a very attractive quality in a person."
Author: Katherine Moennig

29. "I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material."
Author: Kathy Acker

30. "I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people."
Author: Kenneth Anger

31. "If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan's request? Couldn't Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term "fire" exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of "seditious roots" that could "dynamite the world" the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies."
Author: L.L. Barkat

32. "Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all."
Author: Lois Lowry

33. "I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them."
Author: Lois Lowry

34. "On the issue of censorship of pornography and rock music, do you see that as a religious issue, too?Yes, I do. Incidentally, I don't like rock music. I never have liked it. I have never understood it, and I can't hear the lyrics. I think that most people can't hear them either. I'm still stuck with Chopin and Beethoven and Bach, and all those old ones. The whole point is, I feel that everyone who wants to say anything, do anything, should be able to say anything or do anything, within the limits of not hurting another person. And I don't see how rock music hurts anybody, or I don't see that pornography hurts anybody."
Author: Madalyn Murray O'Hair

35. "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."
Author: Mark Coker

36. "Censorship is the height of vanity."
Author: Martha Graham

37. "What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship."
Author: Matthew Lesko

38. "The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself."
Author: Milos Forman

39. "Emperors uphold censorship, But extreme repression leads to extreme reaction. Individualists believe in freedom, But extreme expression leads to extreme reaction."
Author: Ming Dao Deng

40. "I am quite strict as a dad but I don't want to be censorious."
Author: Nick Clegg

41. "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."
Author: Peter S. Jennison

42. "The worst censors are those prohibiting criticism of the theory of evolution in the classroom."
Author: Phyllis Schlafly

43. "Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued."
Author: R. Scott Bakker

44. "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."
Author: Ray Bradbury

45. "There was no censorship of the press: in general, the War Measures Act could have been made even more radical."
Author: Robert Bourassa

46. "To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the vast majority of the world's humans either speak and something primitive or speak something badly."
Author: Robert Lane Greene

47. "En Montford Falls, el primer lugar al que me mude cuando me fui, me llame Eliza. El vecindario donde vivíamos era donde vivían todas estas familias felices, como algo de un viejo show de televisión.En el siguiente lugar, Petree, todos eran ricos. Era Lizbet, y vivíamos en este elevado complejo de apartamentos, todo en oscura madera y aplicaciones de metal. Era como algo sacado de una revista: incluso el ascensor era silencioso.Cuando nos mudamos a Westcott, teníamos una casa en la playa, tan soleada y cálida, y podía llevar flip-flops todo el año si quería. El primer día me presente como Beth.En Lakeview, la casa tenía un aro de baloncesto. Yo iba a ser Liz Sweet."
Author: Sarah Dessen

48. "What? My head doctor says I'm not supposed to censor my thoughts. It's part of my therapy."
Author: Suzanne Collins

49. "The little hand on time's clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here for years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it."
Author: Thomas Mann

50. "Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say "girl"? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you're a saint or you're psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them--fairly. If you're often offended by things, you're probably a self-righteous asshole and it's too bad you weren't censored yourself--by your mother in an abortion clinic."
Author: William T. Vollmann

Censor Quotes Pictures