Robert E. Thacker

Quotes regarding Censorship.
  • "Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."
    • George Bernard Shaw, "The limits to Tolerance", in preface of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet

  • "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
    • George Bernard Shaw

  • "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."
    • George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession

  • "Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."
    • Potter Stewart

  • "The Internet treats censorship as a defect and routes around it."
    • John Gilmore

  • "There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."
    • Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: Coda 1979

  • "Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."
    • Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: Coda 1979

  • "You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
    • Winston Churchill

  • "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
    • Noam Chomsky

  • "Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
    • Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech at Dartmouth College (14 June 1953)

  • "If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not to me."
    • Larry Flynt

  • "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    • Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

  • "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 (1730)

  • "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
    • Thomas Jefferson

  • "Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure way against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is freedom. The surest path to wisdom is liberal education."
    • Alfred Whitney Griswold

  • "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
    • Heinrich Heine

  • "Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only."
    • Plato The Republic, Book II

  • "The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. . . [Censorship of the news] is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information". That is routine behavior in Wartime— for all countries and all combatants— and it makes life difficult for people who value real news."
    • Hunter S. Thompson, "When War Drums Roll" (17 September 2001)

  • "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
    • Unknown, but often attributed to Mark Twain

  • "But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me."
    • Mark Twain, Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore (7 February 1907)

  • "In the mean time, don't worry about the millions of hardcore bukkake, gang-bang, and rape sites your filters miss, satire sites should be your top priority. Irresponsible parents who can't be bothered with supervising their children will thank you for it."
    • George Ouzounian, aka Maddox

  • "The only bad F-word is FCC."
    • Tom Morello

  • "There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
    • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (1891)

  • "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
    • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

  • "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
    • Oscar Wilde

  • "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."
    • Judy Blume

  • "Censorship? Fuck that."
    • Thomas Bacot

  • "Censor this!"
    • Unknown

  • "It'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

  • It seems that Wikipedia.com, that splendid source for all kinds of information, is no longer dedicated to the truth, assuming it ever was.
    Individuals who have tried to edit the pages about Barack Obama — to reflect the incontrovertible fact that he is not God, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan — report that their contributions have vanished within minutes of posting them, and that they, themselves, have been suspended for three days following each 'infraction'.
    When some sort of official at Wikipedia was contacted about this, she stonewalled, claiming that this censorship was the work of 'volunteers', implying they were somehow beyond control of Wikipedia itself.
    Like the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge were 'volunteers'.
 
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