Nazanin Boniadi Quotes

I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.

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.

That President Mohammad Khatami's policies have been blocked is the bitterest incident in the contemporary Iranian history. This means that the wishes of millions of people who voted for Khatami and called for freedom and justice have been ignored... Why should cultural activities and journalism be so risky in Iran?

Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

Give people control of the media and they will use it. Don’t give them control and you will lose it.

This is probably my last free statement through our news media, where the radio and television are already under the heel of the ruling political party of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. One would have thought radio and television were enough as propaganda tools.

All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is only one example of many in recent history.

It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by.

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

Dictators are as scared of books as they are of cannon.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.

We have a free society, and the totalitarian states are dungeons. We have totally different methods of population control…. We can’t control people so we have to control what they think.

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.

One thing is sure — none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring. Certainly, the Thomas Committee is growing more ludicrous daily.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.

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

The Russian Bolsheviks sold out most of the hopes of us early communists. The standard of living increased, and education and medicine improved finally after the 1917 Revolution, but the Russians today have as little freedom as we had under the Czar. That is the tragedy of Russia.