John Seabrook Quotes

I'm afraid that this is me getting on my high horse now but we have yob television, yob newspapers, and funny enough whereas it was my mum and dad, school, police, church who used to set the standards, now it's tabloids and yob television who set the standards by which people live.

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

In TV today, you can say I pricked my finger, but you can't say it the other way around.

We exercise great caution in airing an audio- or videotape released by a terrorist organization holding a hostage. These are decisions made by CNN's editorial staff and not by any third party.

Books follow morals, and not morals books.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

I love my country, but I believe that we are too quick to censor nudity.

Chaperons, even in their days of glory, were almost never able to enforce morality; what they did was to force immorality to be discreet. This is no small contribution.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

I don't think there's one thing I've ever said on the radio that would have been found indecent or obscene.

And they've got to be held accountable; our broadcasting system has to be made accountable; and unless it is, it's going to be very hard to change anything else for the better in this country.

Congress has repeatedly passed laws and otherwise raised a ruckus about indecent language on the broadcast airwaves used for radio and television.

We hear many persuasive voices demanding freedom from restrictions, particularly from moral restraints. However, we learn from the history of the earth that any successful society has had boundaries.

I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, because I think that even though something grotesque or gross has been part of film since way back, what we accept or what we can get away with on the screen is broader now.

This country was founded on a core set of family values. These values should not be discouraged and blatantly undermined by the airing of offensive material on broadcast television and radio.

The media doesn't need a conscience; people need consciences.

They'll say, That's funny, but you can't do that on TV.

What will foreign nations say to our shame, if we allow them to live together by hundreds, like brutes, in utter licentiousness, and do not provide herein as for our own countrymen?

Morality is a social necessity

Apropos of the agitation for abolishing the Censor in England, it occurred to me that not even the advocates of freedom seek to justify the free treatment of sexual matters in any other than a high moral-pointing vein. The notion that sexual themes might allowably be treated in the mere aim of amusement does not seem to have occurred to anybody at all.

A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs.

If we should pass on whether or not a film is pornographic, we should take a look at it.