I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
Censorship Quotes
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will.
This was not to suppress anything. (when asked about calling CBS News to ask them to suppress the embarrassing photos of Iraqi prisoners)
The idea of using censors to bar thoughts of sex is dangerous. A person without sex thoughts is abnormal.
I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject to inquiry, and of criminal inquiry, too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom […]
Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.) Is planning a ban on smut. Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut. And his reverend occiput. Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut., Grit your molars and do your dut., Gird up your l–ns, Smite h-p and th-gh, We’ll all be Kansas By and by. Smite, Smoot, for the Watch and Ward, For […]
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 […]
If M. de Becourt’s book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God’s sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
