Cute Censorship Quotes

Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself.  It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. 

Potter Stewart

I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech. 

Nancie J. Carmody

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.  

Abbott Joseph Liebling

What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books.  

Sigmund Freud

Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?" 

Joseph Henry Jackson

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.  

John Stuart Mill

God forbid that any book should be banned.  The practice is as indefensible as infanticide. 

 Rebecca West

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him.  It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!  

Thomas Carlyle

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. 

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.  

Noam Chomsky

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.  

George Bernard Shaw

If you don't have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught.  

Harold R. Medina

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.  

Heinrich Heine

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.  

Theodore Schroeder

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too. 

Voltaire

A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.  

Albert Camus

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.  

 Voltaire

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.  

John Stuart Mill

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.  

Tommy Smothers

Books won't stay banned.  They won't burn.  Ideas won't go to jail.  In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.  The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.  

 Alfred Whitney Griswold

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.  For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.  

John F. Kennedy

Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government."  

Lenny Bruce