If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed...

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

From an interview with Susie Bright:SB: You were recently reviewed by the New York Times. How do you think the mainstream media regards sex museums, schools and cultural centers these days? What’s their spin versus...

Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of ‘The Giver’: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken...

The value of universal literacy is of course questionable in a society that practices the strictest form of censorship.

The yin to the yang of caring is that sadness is felt just that much more because that caring is so deep. But (and I’m sure you’ll agree) I wouldn’t be any other way. To...

The Wisdom of Solomon (Carl) They censor words not the things they denote:It would create less of a stir to drop a piece of shit on Grant’s tombthan to write it out in white paint....

After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they...

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Only a free hand can draw a free line.

The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of ‘Incautious Maidens’ or ‘Flames at the Metropole.’ So that those who prefer the false...

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space,...

Orwell’s short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot...

Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.

And then they started deleting the protest reviews.That was my line. When they started to stamp out dissent, actually to make it disappear with virtually no excuse for doing so…that’s not neglect. That’s not an...

The worst thing to tell a free people in a country that’s still mostly free is that they are not allowed to read something.

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.

Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that’s when the damage gets done and if we don’t keep that...

Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to...

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 sure weapon against bad ideas is better...

When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden...

When something needs to be said, I’ll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It’s all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

Chinese central government doesn’t need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.

All writers and their readers should stand up and voice their opposition to financial services companies censoring books. Authors should have the freedom to publish legal fiction, and readers should have the freedom to read...

Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called ‘censorship.’ If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship,...

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David...

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.”[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

problem” is to vex, annoy, threaten or harrass them, you are almost certainly a bigger asshole.6. You may also be twelve.7. You are not responsible for anyone else’s actions or karma, but you are responsible...

Young minds – young brains – need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I...

What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities.

It was a pleasure to burn.It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene...

Normally, anything done in the name of ‘the kids’ strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister—that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for...

History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.

And that’s the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the...

To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of...

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.

It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning;...

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero

There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it’s going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.

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...