Vera J. Zasulich Quotes

The suppression of the Socialist press has actually been more rapid and efficient in this republic than it was in the German Empire after the declaration of war. And as for our celebrated Anglo-Saxon tradition of free speech—you can’t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage!

Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious.

It is a crime now in my country to talk about the government's crimes.

Turkey still has one of the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world.

Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.

We've been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn't care about the law.

Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.

Russians have a new freedom, but as long as they don't express that freedom on a public platform.

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

Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is non-existent, it's startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba's mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don't know.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

Political or religious dissenters are the plague of every totalitarian regime.

Arabs can be much more critical of their governments when they are outside of Arab countries.

The entire press of our propertied class speaks only by permission of the government, becoming silent at the slightest nod. At the present time the whole Russian press is prohibited by the Government not only from speaking on the labor question, but even to publish such words as “labor question” or “proletariat”. The working class only uses the free press it has itself created, regarding it as valuable enough to be worth risking imprisonment for.

Pakistan is an anomaly in the Islamic world, in the sense that there is a free press, which is amazing. I can't think of another Islamic country where the press is so free….one cannot claim that there is no fear. There is fear, but more and more people are saying what they want to say

We were behind the iron curtain at last.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

For thirty years the press has ceased to exist in Turkey. There are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no longer have any potency. If I dare, I would call them gelded newspapers or rather, to keep the local color, eunuchs.

Censorship is definitely one of the main issues that you have to live with in China – period!

Turkey jails more journalists than any other country in the world—more than China, more than Iran