111 quotes found
“Irreverence is our only sacred cow.”
“The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”
“Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.”
“[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.”
“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 historical me...”
“American society has willfully deleted the fact of homosexual behavior from its mind, laundering things as they come along, in order to maintain a more comfortable illusion. The censors removed it;...”
“In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]”
“Our country is the only one that truly permits you to speak bad of your country, so you really shouldnt say anything bad about it.”
“The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Any...”
“An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.”
“The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attentio...”
“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 th...”
“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 ...”
“Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air! So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, i...”
“I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?”
“[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric.”
“The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.”
“In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.”
“It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and ...”
