Terry Hands Quotes

In civic life, I think that's where you can debate what is good taste and what is acceptable to other people, and what's gonna offend people. Do that there, but leave it out of art, because art is the one frontier that shouldn't have restraints put on it.

Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression.

I don't believe in censorship.

I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think.

Art has nothing to do with politics. It is the freest thing in the world.

Performers have the right to say what they want to, and anyone paying money has the right to accept or reject the art and entertainment that's available.

I am against censorship in any form. I think anybody should be able to make any movie he or she wants and let the public decide. If it's disgusting and they don't want to see it, they won't go. I believe in the audience.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.

I think political correctness really does help us when it serves us but it doesn't help us when it silences us.

Any sort of political correctness needs to be swept out of the way

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

Political correctness is the fascism of the 90's, it is this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your way of looking at things within very narrow boundaries or else you'll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that way of thinking, and certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries, that's also one of the purposes of art.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

Concerning First Amendment fetishism - A federal subsidy for a photo of a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine is fine, but religious figures on stamps are offensive.

I don't agree with most forms of censorship, and I especially don't agree with the idea that one needs to be from the same cultural, ethnic, or religious background as the subjects they portray in order to be qualified to portray those subjects. I believe that compassion and empathy should cross all of those category barriers, and the conversations art creates can be inflammatory initially, but I think are most often constructive and healing in the long run.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

By going on the defensive. [...] libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.

Such expression is impossible in a cramped atmosphere. As I have no desire to offer civil disobedience I cannot write freely. As the author of satyagraha I cannot, consistently with my profession, suppress the vital part of myself for the sake of being able to write on permissible subjects. ... It would be like dealing with the trunk without the head.

At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say right on motherfuckers!

Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.

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

I like the free-speech stuff, the political-correctness stuff.