Jay-Z Quotes

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

Jazz is a state of mind. There's no boundaries.

Any director or writer or artist has the right to do what they want to do - freedom of expression is something I celebrate.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, ... but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free. Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws.

The fact that we don't have censorship on the Internet really gives you a lot of freedom, as makers and creative people do what they believe in.

I really do have a self-censorship problem, which isn't the way you should be if you're a cartoonist.

I sing, but I also like to write. Creativity is the best part because you're then in your own zone and can talk about whatever you want to talk about - it lets you be free.

If you're going to be transparent, you're going to have to let the music come that wants to come.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

All films are born free and equal.

Everyone should have the right to go off and do their music or do their books. The people who are in the position to censor they're really not down to reality where that certain artists are coming from.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.

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

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying.

Defending freedom of expression against fundamentalist threats is a cause. It is a matter of principle, whether it involves Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses', a film about veils and the oppression of women or some clumsy drawings in a Danish newspaper

Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write.

The most beautiful thing in the world is freedom of speech.

In this Nation every writer, actor, or producer ... should be free from the censor.

We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Ideas won't go to jail.