John Connolly Quotes

If one seeks to disseminate his ideas by means of periodicals or pamphlets, the post-office officials may decline to transmit anything that does not suit their taste; and the courts have decided that the United States post-office has precisely the same right to refuse to carry The Masses that it has to exclude sulfuric acid and dynamite from the mails.

… most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.

But no one should have the right to manipulate my films in the first place.

At the end of the day, people have the right to have opinions. I have the right to have an opinion. And I have the right to say what I want on my music 'cause it's my music. If you don't like it, don't click on it, don't download it.

You can't stop people printing what they want to print.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.

I was for many years myself a journalist and it is not appropriate to say a programme should not be broadcast.

Very few editors worry about heresy - their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness.

The real important thing about Digital-Original publication goes beyond the fact that authors make more money off each sale than through traditional publishing. It's that we get to bypass a system of gatekeepers who have more than 'quality' as criteria for what they choose.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.

The marketing department of any given publishing house has far more power over free expression in America than any government office.

I believe that the defendants had as much right to publish as the Government has to publish the Constitution.

The rights of free speech and free press do not carry with them the right to advocate the right to advocate the destruction of the very government that protects the freedom of an individual to express his views.

This is about standing for fundamental values that have been the foundation for the development of Western democracies over several hundred years, and we are now in a situation where those values are being challenged. I think some of the Muslims who have reacted very strongly to these cartoons are being driven by totalitarian and authoritarian impulses, and the nature of these impulses is that if you give in once they will just put forward new requirements. We do not apologize for printing the cartoons. It was our right to do so.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free..

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

Every book that doesn't first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.

I know better than to ever attempt to get a reporter removed from covering any topic. That would never be an option.