Ray Bradbury Quotes

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

The Constitution exists precisely so that opinions and judgments, including esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature, can be formed, tested, and expressed. What the Constitution says is that these judgments are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority. Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.

In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation's moral and material health. The whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press and broadcasting - all these will be used as a means to this end.

The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

What Donald Trump is, is not movement of change, it's a reaction to global change, it's a total reaction to global change. It's transformational change in the world done by transportation, technology and all that. And people, most of Donald Trump's voters want to go back.

It's very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don't seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it.

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.

Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power.

If the newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development.

This is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

If I said what I was really thinking about this f**ked up world, the government would assassinate me like all the other people they've killed.

The internet is fracturing into a series of huge country-based intranets, in which governments define, in the name of security, what is legitimate personal and intellectual communication, and what is not.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality--a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self--evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.'

You can understand Tunisia revolution as a failure to censor the internet. And Libya had that failure too. It's very difficult for governments that are autocratic and don't have broad popular support to be in power when a lot of people have these devices. That was what Arab Spring was about, that people could express this and lead to revolution.

There is thus little or no ability for an internet user to know when they are being covertly propagandized by their government, which is precisely what makes it so appealing to intelligence agencies, so powerful, and so dangerous.

With the help of pressure groups, government now has crossed over into the final frontier of bigotry, what writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak calls 'Christophobia .' Traditional Christians and Jews are the new counterculture - aliens in a land their forefathers' beliefs and values established and built.

There's a huge cost to freedom in letting people talk about how you print these plastic guns or letting them say these things about arming for tyranny. There's also a cost to letting the government say these ideas can't be expressed, this is treason. It's difficult.

It's very enigmatic because of course, the population [of North Korea] has no contact with the world outside or it's very, very limited. They don't have any telephone connections, no radio, no TV, no movies, no newspapers - nothing from the outside world. This is very strange and there's the very strict, unifying government that forces you to be in step. You see it in the stadium where the spectators create, by flipping cards, an image of the dear leader, or of the volcano, and it's made of a 100,000 human pictures.

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