The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.

I curse when I get really upset. Letting off steam that way makes me feel a little bit better. I’ve been through a lot, but I have never had the urge to go postal. I...

There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

I don’t see it as a form of censorship.

It’s a form of censorship in its crudest and rudest form.

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.

Is there any censorship in your country’s media? Then you are definitely living in a fascist country! Censorship is the tool of the coward governments. Criminals are always afraid of the truths!

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

Only the nonreader fears books.

In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever...

A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his...

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a...

I do not condone illegal activity, … But I can’t stand here today and say that I condone censorship.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public...

If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy … to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these...

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him...

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired,...

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The war on drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American war on words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed...

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

It’s red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I’ve finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy,...

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

Self-censorship is the most insidious form of censorship.

[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship....

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision,...

Limiting the freedom of news ‘just a little bit’ is in the same category with the classic example ‘a little bit pregnant.

Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.

You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex.

They are always so quiet,” he said, turning to Papa. “So quiet.””They are not like those loud children people are raising these days, with no home training and no fear of God,” Papa said, and...

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

[Blog post, March 10, 2014]

Libraries should be open to all – except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]

It is really exhausting to live in a dictatorship of ‘Me’, which is basically a tyranny of others.

Government censorship can slow down, but can’t reverse this trend.

La historia no ha cambiado. Hace mil anos ellos eran los duenos del mundo. Hoy en dia lo siguen siendo. Claro, lo tienen que compartir con los grandes magnates de la tierra, esos que controlan...

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory… In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of...

The censors don’t bother with fantasy books, especially old ones. They can’t understand them. They think it’s all kids’ stuff. They’d die if they knew what The Chronicles of Narnia were really about.

Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled…The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism...

They use it in the same way you might reprove a toilet joke at the dinner table or around relatives. But with them it takes on moral weight. It’s a very damaging mistake: the idea...

Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.

How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to...

The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions...

But you know, a wizard with black hair and a thick mustache put a curse on Moscow, and Petrograd, too, so that no one would be able to tell the truth without lying. If a...

The German Censors —— —— —— —— ———— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ———— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ———— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ————...