Art Suppression Quotes

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

When you see Hitler burning paintings by Salvador Dali and Picasso he's telling you that this time period and these men and this culture didn't exist, and I've seen that happen in other countries, Sudan for instance, it's not enough to kill them you have to destroy all of their markings that they left that was their history.

Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!

There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.

To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.

That DMC Act is a disgrace. And the problem with independent art in this country is that independent artists have been economically blacklisted.

Art made tongue-tied by authority.

They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

To have art suppressed is very dangerous to society.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.