Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments… Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous […]
Censorship Quotes
If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free.
I never knew a girl who was ruined by a book.
Throughout the history of this country there have been incidents where military situations have existed that have led governments to talk to members of the media and make an editorial request of them that they delay for some period disclosing some piece of information, it is not against our history, it is not against our […]
It’s hard to keep a straight face while crying “censorship” in 21st century America – with its cheap and widespread Internet access, tiny percentage of state-owned media, and hundreds of thousands of media jobs… Yes, but I’m talking more about self-censorship,” one editor told me (before he stopped running my columns). Well, sure. It must […]
The worst most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. It becomes almost impossible to conceive of what the suppressed things might […]
The Khomeini cry for the execution of Rushdie is an infantile cry. From the beginning of time we have seen that. To murder the thinker does not murder the thought.
All despotisms should be considered problems of mental hygiene, and all support of censorship should be considered as problems of abnormal psychology.
Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
