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:...

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid...

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

The key to effective censorship is to make sure no one’s looking, and this time everyone was watching.

The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be….Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.

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. In the long run it will create a...

When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back...

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

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

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they’ve been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It’s...

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

They have a way of rising from the ashes,” said Andreus.

We change people through conversation, not through censorship.

We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They...

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...

For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic...

I believe in any kid’s ability to read any book and form their own judgments. It’s the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any...

Word-banning seems to be a trend of late. It’s become fashionable to try to ban words we’re uncomfortable with, which you really can’t do in the first place. You can no more ban a word...

The censor’s sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.

When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

On things like censorship, I think everything should be allowed on television. You know, I mean anything. I don’t know who believes that anymore. Every left wing party says there should be some degree of...

We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves from evil influences we thereby admit their seductive appeal.

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...