Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves.

I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.

What is more tempting for a censor than to censor?

As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.

Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

It's very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don't seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it.

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

If you are an eighteen or nineteen-year-old with little education, as is often the case, and you're put in charge of many, many people on the other end of the world, you have absolute power and you're not prepared for it.

Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.

For reasons of national security and out of consideration for some people still alive I have omitted certain material. Some of this material cannot be made available for many years, perhaps for many generations.

We are not hiding things from the American people, but China everyday is conducting business in a way that hides things from their people.

The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.

Everyone feels like an underdog, at some point in their life. Even the best-looking people and the most athletic probably have a phase in their life - a year or two - where they're awkward or they have braces.

Thousands of people die every year of cold, so if we had global warming it would save lives ... We ought to look out for people. The earth can take care of itself.

I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Bahrain. The first year I went pretty much by myself. Then I went with General [Richard] Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The shows and audiences were amazing. You'll never get a better group of people.

I'm sure in a few years it will be unthinkable to say there were 20 years when we didn't recognize the People's Republic of China. And then we'll have to explain what the political constraints were and why it didn't happen earlier.

The truth is, an actor's performance is the result of work by a lot more people than just the actor. When you see that character portrayed up on screen, there is the work certainly of the actor, but there's the work of the editor, there's the work of what the camera was doing. What the music was doing, all of the above.

The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.

People who are interested with me have for sure gotten older over the years, for example, grandparents are coming up to me telling me they grew up watching me.

Stories about sensitive issues like sex, drugs or sexual assault, suicide and teen drinking, are often censored because people just don't want to talk about those things. It's not that these things don't happen, but when they're shared in a fictional setting, for some reason they make some people uncomfortable.

After nearly 6,000 years of evidence on the subject, one thing stands clear: the people who end up as leaders in any organization, large or small, are often the craziest guys around.

A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.

We deal five minutes with a person and their conversion and then we spend the next fifty years trying to disciple a goat into a sheep. I'm not saying this because I'm angry. I'm saying this because countless people are being deceived.

It's almost obscene when you see people who haven't matured, who haven't changed, who don't have the weight of years on them. So that's interesting to me - to think about playing him into the future, anew.