Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.

The cartoons which I enjoy have caused some kind of out rage, but they have got people talking about these issues out in the open and in essence that's what its all about.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

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 of the jobs of comedy is to expose hypocrisy. When you look at countries like Iran or North Korea that don't have freedom of speech, we who do should push it as far as we need to.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book. - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

[T]he German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul.

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

Several times I drew a critical cartoon and then, at the last moment, stopped myself from putting it out in print. I thought it would be misunderstood, be a politically incorrect thing to do.

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.

Young adult author Richelle Mead holds the distinction to perhaps be the only author ever to have a book banned... before it was even written.

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

My musician friends are banned from playing concerts in China because they share the same views as I do. My name cannot appear on the web, because my opinion is different from the Party.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

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

Popular culture, in all its crudeness, is the output of liberals. It is liberalism that for decades has rejected any protest as 'censorship' or 'McCarthyism.'

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .

From the start, I've always admired Eminem's thinking. That's the reason I wanted to appear on the Grammys with him when I was asked. Eminem has the balls to say what he feels and to make offensive things funny. That's very necessary today in America, with people being muzzled and irony becoming a lost art. Artists like Eminem who use their free speech to get a point across are vitally important. There just aren't many people in the world with balls that big and talent that awesome.

If you come across an American artist right now who has no political opinions or is afraid of talking politics, be very concerned.