Rupert Murdoch Quotes

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

If you don't think a television news show represents the truth, you can turn off your TV. If you don't think a magazine represents the truth, you can cancel your subscription. You have the right to expose yourself to whatever information you want. But to have the government prescribing what the truth is or limiting the information available for the citizen is contrary to the 1st Amendment.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

Beslan, where the Russian authorities stopped live coverage of the school being stormed, was an illustration of the progress we still have to make.

With a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world-no middle man, no big brother. I guess this changes everything.

There was no censorship of the press: in general, the War Measures Act could have been made even more radical.

The truth is, there's an information blockade in America, and it must be broken. In order to find crucial facts, numbers and outside perspectives, a person must spend an hour searching and cross-searching on the computer.

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense—the sheerest mockery.

Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious.

Freedom of speech and exchange of information are not just luxuries; they are the currency on which global commerce, politics, and culture increasingly depend.

Pakistan is an anomaly in the Islamic world, in the sense that there is a free press, which is amazing. I can't think of another Islamic country where the press is so free….one cannot claim that there is no fear. There is fear, but more and more people are saying what they want to say

With the Internet, information is knowledge and knowledge is freedom.

Ordinary Chinese are also getting unprecedented access to information. More than half a billion Chinese now use the Internet.

When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

Like the invention of the printing press before it, the Internet has been the greatest instrumentality of free speech and the exchange of ideas in the history of mankind.

Free speech is the foundation of an open and liberal democracy from college campuses to the White House.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

The Internet is a clear example of how our lives have changed in ways we couldn't have imagined: a distributed information source, which is invisible to everyone, where you can access anything, and it's distributed throughout the whole world. Basically, communication is instantaneous.