There was a patriotic fervor and the Administration used it so that if you challenged anything you were made to feel that there was something wrong with that.... And there was even almost a patriotism police which, you know, they'd be up there on the internet sort of picking anything a Christiane Amanpour, or somebody else would say as if it were disloyal... Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on.
When Howard Dean started saying some honest things, they hung him.
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
The exercise of politics is criminalized in Venezuela.
If I could go, I would tell the truth to the North American people. President Reagan personally ordered my visa to be denied.
What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.
When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consultants very gradually but inevitably became literal reactionaries.
When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.
When politicians seek to restrict political speech, it is invariably to protect their own incumbency and avoid having to defend their policies in the marketplace of ideas.
We're allowed to say wonderful things about the Royal Family in the House of Commons. What you're not allowed to say is: anything that might be truthful, but that might upset them. So from time to time I've been pulled up because I've said things which I think are important.
With a population of 1.4 billion, China is a lucrative market. But getting into that market isn't cheap. At best, the price of doing business in China is silence; at worst, it's reading talking points straight from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing is not subtle about it.
When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.
This is probably my last free statement through our news media, where the radio and television are already under the heel of the ruling political party of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. One would have thought radio and television were enough as propaganda tools.
Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.
No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanly directed in the first instance.
It never occurred to me that I was important enough to have some politician go out of his way to silence me. I only found out about it in the '80s by accident - a broadcaster announced they received letters of commendation from the White House for having suppressed my music. My career was so highly impacted in the U.S. it will never recover.
It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.
We have organized lobbyists in favor of Israel. You can't open your mouth. I can call the president of the United States anything in the book, but if you say one thing about Israel, and you're off limits.
As I discovered, even the governor of a major state who holds pro-life views can be denied a hearing at his party's convention without the national media protesting it.
When you say politics, you conjure a whole bunch of associations: elections, campaigning, debates, fundraising. None of this exists in Russia! We are still fighting not for election victories but for having elections at all.
In any country, in any city, there will be political influence on what is said, what kind of images are to be projected and, yes, of course artists can be and are influenced by politicians.
It's never been written about, but before the blacklist of Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten, there was a de facto blacklist by Communists in the movie industry, and there were a lot of them.
For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored 'The Act of Killing,' hoping it would go away.
