Toni Morrison Quotes

Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

I don't remember a time when words were not dangerous.

Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.

Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. The worst thing about this power is that you may not even know you're using it.

So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

We have evolved to understand that language of power that's taken too much.

If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human accomplishment, may we not all pledge to avoid the silly censoring that can lead to a codification of Orwell's Newspeak? Consider John Milton's reasons for why good arguments are often lost: 'For want of words, no doubt, or lack of breath!'

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.

I tell Donald Trump that the establishment will tell their lies. They will try to keep him down. I tell him, 'Now Mr. Trump, they're treating you like a black man.' I say, 'Mr. President, you know what it's like to be a black man. No matter what you say or do, you are guilty as hell.'

The media—stenographers to power.

To negotiate is not to do as one likes.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.

The enemy has always been able to point the finger of suspicion and/or guilt to Black leaders that they are enriching themselves at the expense of the people.

A law imposing criminal penalties on protected speech is a stark example of speech suppression.

I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

A man has a right to think lots of things he has no right to say.

Some people need a fig-leaf on their mouths.