Quotes on censorship
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
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John Stuart Mill Quotes
I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
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Mae West Quotes
Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government."
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Lenny Bruce Quotes
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
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Rebecca West Quotes
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
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John Stuart Mill Quotes
Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
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Potter Stewart Quotes
If you don't have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught.
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Harold R. Medina Quotes
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
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John F. Kennedy Quotes
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
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Walt Whitman Quotes
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
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Henry Steele Commager Quotes
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
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Heinrich Heine Quotes
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
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Voltaire Quotes
Every burned book enlightens the world.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
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Voltaire Quotes
Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
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John Stuart Mill Quotes
A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.
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Albert Camus Quotes
A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased - he hates all creative people equally.
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Robert Heinlein Quotes
Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.
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Dick Cavett Quotes
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
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Sigmund Freud Quotes
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
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Tommy Smothers Quotes
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
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Noam Chomsky Quotes
To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list.
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John Aikin Quotes
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
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Alfred Whitney Griswold Quotes