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.

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.