Richard Curtis Quotes
The great thing about the Internet is that it will not abide by the rules.
Curtis, Richard. Interview by Claire E. White. Writers Write, vol. 5, no. 9, Nov. 2001.
The Senator was referring to the difficulty that governments have in censoring and controlling information on the Internet.
This seemingly logical inconsistency is actually typical of many nations and cultures that practice censorship. Freedom in this is a concept of a limited freedom—limited to what is reasonable, not harmful, not offensive. So all are free to behave within a circumscribed set of norms. By this logic, freedom is not being curtailed if the state acts to stop activity beyond those norms. Every nation accepts this principle to some extent. In America one “cannot should fire in a crowded theater” but there are very few other restrictions. But in Germany, Israel and other modern Industrial democracies there is censorship of material that promotes ethnic hatred whereas in the U. S. that is protected from censorship. In China many sites on the Internet have material that is regarded as inflammatory, or slanders the government and this is bad because people might lose confidence in their government. So freedom of speech and censorship issues are matters of degree with the United State being at one end of the scale and North Korea and Saudi Arabia being at the other end. China has been moving from the North Korean end of the scale towards the middle.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. After the development of the atomic bomb there were great pressures on the involved scientists to downplay the dangers of nuclear weapons development. The weapons developer arm of the government was anxious not to frighten the public which might call for more oversight or even limitation of development and testing. Equally important was the scientists themselves who understood the forces that they had unleashed and were worried that if the public realized the worst of the possibilities, science and scientific research itself might be in jeopardy from a new Luddite reaction. Oppenheimer urged candor with the public. Most scientists took his advice but the Atomic Energy Commission had become politicized and when Oppenheimer went public with his and others scientific concerns they punished him by calling him a security risk and withdrawing his clearance thus cutting him off from new developments and discrediting him and his views at the same time.
Richard Whalley Anthony Curtis, CBE, is a British screenwriter, producer, and film director. One of Britain's most successful comedy screenwriters, he is known primarily for romantic comedy films, among them Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Love Actually (2003), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), About Time (2013) and Yesterday (2019). He is also known for the drama War Horse (2011), and for having co-written the hit sitcoms Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley. His early career saw him write material for the BBC's Not the Nine O'Clock News and ITV's Spitting Image.
