Harry Belafonte Quotes

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

I am sure that as soon as speech was invented, efforts to suppress and control it began, and that process of suppression continues unabated.

The fact that we don't have censorship on the Internet really gives you a lot of freedom, as makers and creative people do what they believe in.

Even if censorship might encourage creative ways to circumvent it, it still slows down progress and our ability to realise our full creative potential. And that is why I vehemently fight against it.

Art is where we make a stand. If we don't make it there, freedom of expression is lost for everyone - for artists, for journalists, and for everyday people.

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I'm tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.

Censor, n. An officer of certain governments, employed to supress the works of genius. Among the Romans the censor was an inspector of public morals, but the public morals of modern nations will not bear inspection.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves.

Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.

Anybody that's old and closed-minded does not like Rick James... They don't like the fact that I'm free and I'm wide open.

I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That's what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn't funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

You burn the paper, but not the words. You silence the words, but not the thoughts. You kill the thoughts only if you kill the man. And you will find that his thoughts rise again in the minds of others - twice as strong as before.

The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.

I believe for freedom. I believe that people should express themselves the way they want, except as it does in the way that's not nice, but it is what it is.

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?