Censorship Quotes
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Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that...may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
William J. Brennan, Jr. -
We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others.
William Randolph Hearst
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Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves.
Emma Stone -
Life is full of censorship. I cant spit in your eye.
Katharine Hepburn -
Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognize it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship.
Aryeh Neier -
Censorship places us all in subjection, just as under despotism we are all equal … that kind of freedom of the press acts to introduce oligarchy into questions of the spirit. … That [kind of] freedom of the press pushes presumptuousness to the point of forestalling world history, substituting itself for the voice of the people. …
Hal Draper -
Well, part of the thing is, like, what's the difference between censorship and social responsibility? I sometimes find that the whole censorship argument is used as a way for people to avoid the fact that they're like.
Kathleen Hanna Bikini Kill -
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather
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Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts." This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.
William O. Douglas -
In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.
Max Lerner -
I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.
William O. Douglas -
President Arroyo's actions could usher in a new era of press censorship and intimidation.
Barbara Cochran -
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw -
I am against censorship in any form. I think anybody should be able to make any movie he or she wants and let the public decide. If it's disgusting and they don't want to see it, they won't go. I believe in the audience.
William H. Macy
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We are in an era where censorship is creeping back in through the Patriot Act and where people are.. being intimidated not to speak about what we should be speaking about.
Gerald Nicosia -
Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.
William Hazlitt -
When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
Paul Goodman -
The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make "no law" which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that "no law" does not mean what it says, that "no law" is qualified to mean "some" laws. I cannot take this step.
William O. Douglas -
Aside from the collective gain that comes from that free interchange of ideas, there is a direct personal value for the individual concerned. Each of us should have the right to speak his thoughts and to hear the thoughts of others.
Charles Rembar -
People must not think that all bad in man which is unleashed, the moment you impose censorship disappears from man.
Milos Forman
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For many years there have been treatments available which are successful and usually NOT harmful for diseases, such as AIDS, cancer, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, organ regeneration and other diseases. One by one these treatments and their creators or proponents have been targeted by the FDA, which I call the "office of orthodoxy enforcement," illegally using just powers derived from the consent of governed. These forms of tyranny are always accompanied by multi agency intrusions or harassment, confiscation of private medical files, censorship of written materials and threats or prosecution.
Charles C. Pixley -
One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to believe in it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else— the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film or speaker banned because otherwise he himself might be harmed.
Edgar Dale -
“In the long run, an open airing of discriminatory ideas, and an ensuing debate about them, may well be more effective in curbing them than censorship would be.”
Nadine Strossen -
Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
Alice Mattison