Walter Gropius Quotes

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.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

My musician friends are banned from playing concerts in China because they share the same views as I do. My name cannot appear on the web, because my opinion is different from the Party.

The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

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.

There are no longer opponents of Putin's policy, and if there are, they are mentally ill and should be sent to prophylactic health examination.

Just be glad you don't live in one of those little countries where at this very moment, music is severely restricted, or as it is in Iran, totally illegal.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

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.

I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

In any country, in any city, there will be political influence on what is said, what kind of images are to be projected and, yes, of course artists can be and are influenced by politicians.

Routine is a declivity down which many governments slide, and routine says that freedom of the press is dangerous.

There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

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.

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.

There is no real public opinion in Communist countries. They are ruled by an oligarchy.

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.

The state must not ... let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called "freedom of the press," ... it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state.

I can only hope that the American people who have often shown their liking for my work as a painter, realizing that their access to it is hindered by institutional and governmental control, will understand the compelling motives for my gift.

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!