Censor: A self-appointed snoophound who sticks his nose in other people’s business.
Censorship Quotes
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 […]
One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want 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 banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed.
The people are the only censors of their governors, and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution.
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
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.
