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...

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a...

At CBS, I’m in your house. I’m mindful of that. When I do standup, you’re in my home and I can say what I want to.

The delay in the application of the policy to books has several explanations. For one thing, Blackshirts were not, nor have they yet become, bookworms; and the intellectual bread of Mussolini himself is made, usually,...

It’s a prior restraint; it’s state censorship.

In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a...

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

This excerpt includes both a cautionary tale of being caught en flagrante and a stirring defense of getting fucked.Redeeming social value, indeed.

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks,...

I’ve been quoting the book [on Peter Sutcliffe] constantly in rehearsals. Some members of the cast have stated their disapproval that it should even have been written. Some of the women have expressed more –...

Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Where the truth is censored, the truth grows claws.

[M]an is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.

We appreciate your coming to us with a copy of your letter to your sister, but it was unnecessary. Your offense was known to us even before the letter’s receipt by your sister. Effective as...

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Irreverence is our only sacred cow.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was,...

A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.

By deciding what is, and is not, allowed to be discussed in a review,by removing discussion of social context, and saying that only thewords on the page count, Goodreads is ignoring fifty years of developmentof...

As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

eduvstThe fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don’t like. It’s completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and...

Even in societies where words are often strictly controlled, messages diverse never die. Resembling seeds scattered here and there, they find all manner of cracks and crevices to root.

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

You clap. The Censor wakes up. We all get into trouble.

Did you ever hear anyone say, ‘That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me’?

Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was.

Thus was born the Incunabula: it was forged by fire and persecution, to preserve and protect until the book might rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of demise.

Redeeming social value, indeed.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

A large class of readers … will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the...

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the...

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he...

Too many adults wish to ‘protect’ teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.

We’re all watching each other, so there’s no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.

Every man — in the development of his own personality — has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of...

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted...

Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldn’t say anything bad about it.

If people wrote their reviews on paper and put them into a real, physical library, I am sure that the Goodreads administrators would be very reluctant to pull them down from shelves and burn them....

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”[Whitney v. California, 274...

It says a lot about Sandberg’s brand of feminism that this campaign focuses on policing language rather than bringing attention to important issues that have real impact on women and girls

To reach the pinnacle of your writings potential; productivity becomes obsolete.

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.

I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don’t believe in forbidden knowledge.