Milos Forman Quotes

Once you “volunteer” and engage in self-censorship something happens to your conscience.

I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.

Most politicians aren't allowed to express themselves any more.

I realize that, in speaking to you this afternoon, there are certain limitations placed upon the right of free speech. I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and prudent as to how I say it. I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think.

Once you get used to censorship, sometimes you self-censor.

In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

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

It's kinda ridiculous what you can't say nowadays. You really can't say anything you believe! I think it's fricking ridiculous how sensitive everyone is to everything, how much things are frowned upon. How much stuff will cost you nowadays. I think it's fricking ridiculous that we can't - there's certain topics that you can't really say how you feel about.

No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.

In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.

I believe America went wrong in terms of respecting the First Amendment, the state of free speech on American college campuses and on the media and in academia.

Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?

Political correctness is bad.

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

The freedom to speak is meaningless without the corollary freedom to keep silent.