Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Whether it's Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.

I think if you open the door to government control of television, then you let in a host of questions about rights.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

To try to be authentic these days, to ask questions of the people in power - it's difficult. This administration has evolved new techniques to handle people like me. Their strategy, in a word, is simple: ignore them.

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

I find it very offensive when the government tells me what I can and cannot watch. Censor yourself.

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.

To the media, I have become a symbolic figure, critical of China. According to the government, I am a dangerous threat.

If you don't think a television news show represents the truth, you can turn off your TV. If you don't think a magazine represents the truth, you can cancel your subscription. You have the right to expose yourself to whatever information you want. But to have the government prescribing what the truth is or limiting the information available for the citizen is contrary to the 1st Amendment.

Television should be regulated like a toaster.

Prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment Rights.

The Censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.

I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

In the Soviet Union you weren't allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

Speak, speak, speak, & remember that whenever anyone's liberty to speak is denied, your liberty is denied also, & your place is where the attack is.

The traditional media [in China] is still heavily controlled by the government; social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit. But because you don't have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.

If I said what I was really thinking about this f**ked up world, the government would assassinate me like all the other people they've killed.

The internet is fracturing into a series of huge country-based intranets, in which governments define, in the name of security, what is legitimate personal and intellectual communication, and what is not.

There's a huge cost to freedom in letting people talk about how you print these plastic guns or letting them say these things about arming for tyranny. There's also a cost to letting the government say these ideas can't be expressed, this is treason. It's difficult.