Suppression of Information Quotes

What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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

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

Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.

I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

We are not hiding things from the American people, but China everyday is conducting business in a way that hides things from their people.

Silence kills scandal.

If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.

In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.

I can't think of a time that the U.S. government asked us or instructed us not to report or air something.

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.

Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).

Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call 'catch and kill.'