Simon Hoggart Quotes

I had the X rating on my films. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

It's incredible that they censor films. It's sad.

I think 'The Simpsons' is in the right time slot because it's not a show for kids. It's too vulgar. And 'Ren and Stimpy' is worse. We would never do anything like that.

Fact is stranger than fiction. You see people walking down the street that would never be allowed on television. You have to tone it down.

In TV today, you can say I pricked my finger, but you can't say it the other way around.

It's very irresponsible as a parent to follow Tipper Gore or the Religious Right's advice and just take the offending CD or game away from the kid without discussing it.

It seems to me that a great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

The one thing that is absolutely essential is that there shouldn't be any governmental control [of the media] directly or indirectly.

Well the thing is that under the [Ronald] Reagan administration, excesses have occurred in terms of over regulating certain types of behavior, and excesses have occurred in the opposite direction, in de-regulating other types of behavior. As a matter of fact, if they continue to regulate the airlines, we might have safer skies, and if they slack off on the radio, we might have better radio. If they just use it as a threat, eventually there's going to be another test case like the one that the 7 dirty words ruling came out of, and basically, its extortion.

For better or worse, editing is what editors are for; and editing is selection and choice of material. That editors newspaper or broadcast can and do abuse this power is beyond doubt, but that is no reason to deny the discretion Congress provided.

As far as "uncut" I think we all know that you guys cut up the special. Originally it was going to be 2 hours plus and it got chopped down so I said "we can't use those words because it's not going to represent me right".

If America's tv and movie producers are unwilling to clean up their act... when it comes to sex, bloodshed and violence in their programming... the government stands ready to step in.

To me it's a mystery that you can show the horrific things in the movies, but not some sexual stuff which everyone does.

They're intimidating the networks and levying these fines, so the networks are not sure of what they can or can't do.

The censors wouldn't even let me sit on a guy's lap, and I've been on more laps than a table-napkin.

You literally can shoot someone in the face on television and a 7-year-old can watch it. But you can't show the slight of a man's hip, because dear God, someone might think of sex. And while we all hope our kids grow up to have sex, we do not hope they grow up to shoot someone in the face.

Perhaps there is such a thing as obscene sex, but I know that violence is always obscene. So I don't get it, that you can disembowel a woman but you can't see her tits. Who made that up? That's sick!

Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression.

Infinitely more taboos, on television.

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.

What infuriates me is that in America violence is judged in context, whereas language is not. So with language there is an arithmetic that says: one f*** is a PG 13, two f***s is an R. They don't say: one bullet through one head is a PG 13, two bullets through more than two heads is an R.

This is nothin for the radio... but they'll still play it though

I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.