Rex Stout Quotes

History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.

I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.

If people want to talk about anything I do, they can give it any name they want. As long as they're talking about it, I think it's great.

It never hurt Lenny Bruce's career to get arrested for swearing. It did back in the time, but he broke those doors down by doing the stuff that he believed in.

The only thing that is obscene is censorship.

The 1st Amendment is about how we govern ourselves—not about how we titillate ourselves sexually.

The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

I would rather put up with Rush Limbaugh and live in a country where we all do have freedom of speech.

The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.

What is one man's hate speech is another man's poetry.

Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

I hate to do anything that is going to stop or suppress free speech.

If I'm gonna get my balls blown off for a word, my word is "poontang".

Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.

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.

Joe Lieberman frightens me. Why should we, an Hollywood voter, donate money to a man who threatens our creative freedom, our freedom of expression.

Anyone buying this book is going to be out a tidy sum if he is sucked in by the title. I wish I could write a real sexy book that would be barred from the mails. Apparently nothing whets a reader's appetite for literature more than the news that the author has been thrown into a federal pokey for disturbing the libido of millions of Americans.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

I'd heard that Lenny Bruce used a lot of profanity and obscenities in his act, and I was curious.

To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water.

The spirit of the First Amendment has been effectively repealed for conservative speech by a censorious, accusatory mob.