Censorship Impact Quotes

The American public is capable of doing its own censoring… If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.

As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

People must not think that all bad in man which is unleashed, the moment you impose censorship disappears from man.

Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

When censorship is intelligent, it will stop a film before it is made. If not, it is too late.

This is precisely the purpose of censorship - not only to block unwanted views, but to keep people who are unhappy from knowing how many millions of others share their unhappiness; to keep the dormant opposition from awakening to its own developing strength.

Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.

The surest way to make our youth suspect that there may be something in Communism would be for the government to outlaw it.

Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.