Kathy Griffin Quotes

I don't believe anything is truly off limits, but as a performer, one has to know that people might be offended, and there are consequences.

I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

If the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and press is to mean anything, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community.

I'm always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.

Who's to say where funny stops and 'too far' starts?

I mean, believe me, I'm not for censorship.

I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

A moral argument about whether censorship is good or bad deteriorates quickly into accusations about who is more or less patriotic, moral, pious, and so on.

I'm not allowed to be as liberal as I would like to be, you know? I'd do a lot more damage if I could!

You know, everybody believes in free speech until you start questioning them about it.

I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing.

In Canada we respect freedom of speech but we do not worship it.

Law for the Protection of Values from Shame

Censorship is the conscience of society.

There ought to be limits to freedom.

It's very difficult to have just a little bit of censorship.

Most of us will agree that the right to say anything anywhere, no matter what the consequences, is carrying the right to free expression a bit too far. We run into controversy, however, when we try to draw the line between protected free expression and the kind of expression that should be prohibited because of the potential harm that it can do.

The standard of what offends 'the common conscience of the community' conflicts ... with the command of the First Amendment. ... Certainly that standard would not be an acceptable one if religion, economics, politics or philosophy were involved. How does it become a constitutional standard when literature treating with sex is concerned? Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to 'sexual impurity' or has a tendency to 'excite lustful thoughts.' This is community censorship in one of its worst forms...

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Rules about what you can and can’t say often have unintended consequences. … In everything we do, we need to make sure we’re empowering people, not simply reinforcing existing institutions and power structures.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone - except God.