Alanis Morissette Quotes

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.

Pakistan is an anomaly in the Islamic world, in the sense that there is a free press, which is amazing. I can't think of another Islamic country where the press is so free….one cannot claim that there is no fear. There is fear, but more and more people are saying what they want to say

We are providing a platform to creators who are expressing their emotions; they are expressing what they are feeling - fears, joys, terror. That's what art is about, and we don't want to censor it, but neither would we permit violence which feels gratuitous or glorified to be on our platform.

People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that prove it.

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.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

We need to take on Hollywood. They are poisoning the minds of our kids.

The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

Art is where we make a stand. If we don't make it there, freedom of expression is lost for everyone - for artists, for journalists, and for everyday people.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.

Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.

Well, the problem is the freedom that the sport gives you without getting to politics. Unfortunately, you cannot now separate it because people cannot be truthful; they have to be politically correct. There's no more sincerity. What we had before was freedom of speech and freedom of expression without judgement. That's why I don't get into politics.

... censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books--with one hand.

There's a big thing right now with people using stand-up as a scapegoat. People think comedians have the power to change someone in an hour. If we had that ability, the art would not be legal. It would too dangerous.

If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk.