Etgar Keret Quotes

If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.

I need to be free, to speak the unspeakable. You can't do that in office.

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

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

The silence of peoples is something kings should study.

In the end, the thing that's important about free expression is that it's the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. What always increases the power of an authoritarian regime is whether it can successfully prevent people from expressing themselves.

I lived long enough in a society where freedom of speech was nonexistent, and I know what kind of misery that creates - starting with the fact that life becomes very boring for people who just try to survive, and are quiet, and try not to buck the system. And, of course, it can be devastating for people who try to speak against it.

Who is it that said that 'you have not converted a man because you have silenced him?' This is true of the use of the military on people.

There are different qualities of silence. There's the silence that sustains us, as women, that nourishes us, the silence where I believe our true voice, our authentic voice, dwells. But there's also the silence that censors us, that tells us what we have to say does not want to be heard, should not be heard, has no value. And that if we speak, it will be at our own peril. This kind of silence is deadly. This kind of silence is deadening to who we are as women. And when a woman is silenced, the world is silenced. When a woman speaks, there is an opening.

People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me

A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

Let us refuse to be silent! Speaking freely is a decisive step forward on the road to freedom.

There are social restrictions where someone could be suppressing someone else's freedom to express themselves.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

People call me for interviews on censorship type topics all the time, like that Gannette interview.I don't hold myself out to be an authority on it, but the reason they call me is that they know that I'll at least open my mouth, and give an opinion, whereas other people will play it safe, and won't say anything, because they don't want to offend anybody.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

There are still people that have been held for human rights that shouldn't be held for just speaking their mind.

A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.

A great ox stands on my tongue.

Everyone has freedom to say whatever they want to say. I think it takes a stronger person to hold their tongue as opposed to speaking out.

I think that people don't make the most of their lives. So, you know, for me, it seems like it's the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice in some way or make me look like I'm a lunatic or pinpoint the inaccuracies in my grammar to somehow take away from the overall message of what I'm saying.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power.

Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.