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...

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...