Kathy Acker Quotes

In times of social tension we pull back on expression, and we always end up believing that it was the wrong thing to do.

The P.C. police are out in force at all times... We've reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say.

Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can't talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.

We're led to believe everybody opposes it and disagrees with political correctness, but yet everybody's scared to death of it. So who is it? Well, it's the power structure wherever you happen to be.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

Political Correctness doesn't change us, it shuts us up.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

Everybody is under pressure to shut up and sing.

Heretics are no longer burned at the stake. But they are marginalized by cultural and educational institutions.

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

The public does not necessarily want to hear, much less to act on unsettling or disturbing findings… censorship can be, and is frequently supported by the majority of the population.

If printers (publishers) only printed that which everyone liked, there would be very little printed

I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that's a bad thing for society.

I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist.

The culture of ganging up against one for airing his/her views prevails here in Tamil Nadu.

In too many ways, political correctness has been a bully.

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Partly, I'm worried that no one is saying anything because they are afraid of being seen as politically correct.

If you have political convictions... keep 'em to yourself

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

I think that when we start thought-policing people and idea-policing people, then that's crossing a line. And I think, you know, everybody's so afraid of this imaginary line of thought police that they forget their own personal safety.

I am politically incorrect, that's true. Political correctness to me is just intellectual terrorism. I find that really scary, and I won't be intimidated into changing my mind. Everyone isn't going to love you all the time.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.