Barbara Hall Quotes

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

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

The Iranian government advocates free speech... but there's no freedom after you've spoken

For thirty years the press has ceased to exist in Turkey. There are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no longer have any potency. If I dare, I would call them gelded newspapers or rather, to keep the local color, eunuchs.

Censorship is definitely one of the main issues that you have to live with in China – period!

People like to quiet the speech of others.

Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom.

The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.

There's hardly any governmental censorship in Korea.

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

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

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

[E]rroneous statement … must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to be given the breathing space that they need ... to survive.

Every censorship, however good its intent, degenerates inevitably into tyranny.

Freedom of the press, printing, publication and mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship on newspapers is forbidden as well as notifying, suspending or cancelling them by administrative methods. In a state of emergency or in time of war a limited censorship may be imposed on the newspapers, publications and mass media in matters related to public safety or purposes of national security in accordance with the law.

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.

Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

… most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.

We cannot have a society in which some dictator somewhere can impose censorship here in the United States.

We must have a free press. If we are to maintain democracxy as we know it, we must have a free and adversarial press.... That's how dictoators get power [by intimidating, restriciting and censoring the press.]

We can't let censorship take over.

Everyone loses when voices get stifled.

Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.