No totalitarian censor can approach the implacability of the censor who controls the line of communication between the outer world and our consciousness. Nothing is allowed to reach us which might weaken our confidence and lower our morale.
Censorship Quotes
(Wowsers) are all dirty fellows, and in many of them the sexual obsession is so manifest that it becomes revolting. Old Comstock himself, as everyone knows, kept a collection of filthy pictures in his desk, and vastly enjoyed exhibiting it to like-minded visitors.
Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in… libel laws… and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers.
But the true secret of the expurgator’s folly is to be sought, not in his stupidity, but in his moral fervor. He is, in brief, a professional moralist of the most offensive kind, and, like all other members of his clan, he is unable to estimate anything save in terms of morality. He sees Shakespeare, […]
Censor: A self-appointed snoophound who sticks his nose in other people’s business.
The vast number of titles which are published each year – all of them are to the good, even if some of them may annoy or even repel us for a time. For none of us would trade freedom of expression and of ideas for the narrowness of the public censor. America is free market […]
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if […]
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
Did you ever hear anyone say “That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be damanging to me”?
For books are not absolutely dead things, but… do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And […]
