Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.

You’re sad but you hold everything back…

… the Chinese have become very good at coming up with puns, alternative words, and memes. For example, they talk about the battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. The grass-mud horse, caonima,...

Although erotica authors are being targeted, this is an issue that should concern all indie authors. It affects indies disproportionately because indies are the ones pushing the boundaries of fiction. Indies are the ones out...

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous – they contain ideas.

To say, ‘don’t have it’, that’s censorship. That’s what is being done. That is what is being said by the control board letter and by the sheriff.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the...

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

I’m a big anti-censorship person,

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

This is censorship of the worst kind.

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

If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.

This book is irrelevant to Goodreads because you can’t buy it on Amazon. Also it talks about oppression, censorship etc. and no one really likes reading about that because it’s boring. Yet, let me tell...

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains – editing, and it’s going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to...

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer – he steps forth like a...

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.

I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don’t need to ‘control’ free speech, we need to control ourselves.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.

For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, ‘To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.’ (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

They told me I was not to draw.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a...

And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone...

If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest;...

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger...

I have a real issue with anyone trying to protect children from their own imaginations. If we cannot acknowledge that a lot of us have a bit of darkness within ourselves, some more than others...

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

If you can’t say “Fuck” you can’t say, “Fuck the government.

In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices-and all because of fear.

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: ‘Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and...

Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation...

Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.

The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.

The term “political correctness” has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell’s “Thought Police” and fascist regimes.

There was something so unutterably ridiculous about the sight of a US company deleting posts accusing it of censorship that many other people began to protest.

Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business...

[O]ne man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at...

Poems are difficult to silence.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered,...

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone’s teeth get cleaner?

An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever...

Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor’s grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

Calling a book “Young Adult” is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. People used to say they like to read books about romance, true crime, comedy, horror or science fiction. But...

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple:...