Censorship Quotes
+5I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- Voltaire
+3Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
- Voltaire
+3What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
- Sigmund Freud
+1Free speech is life itself.
- Salman Rushdie
+1Free speech not only lives, it rocks!
- Oprah Winfrey
+1Every burned book enlightens the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
+1The paper burns, but the words fly away.
- Akiba ben Joseph
+1You can cage the singer but not the song.
- Harry Belafonte
+1The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.
- David Ben
+1Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.
- Mark Twain
+1Books won’t stay banned Ideas won’t go to jail.
- Alfred Whitney
+1The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
- Walt Whitman
+1Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
- George Bernard Shaw
+1The ultimate form of censorship is assassination.
- George Bernard Shaw
+1To reject the word is to reject the human search.
- Max Lerner
+1I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
- Mae West
+1I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man.
- Thomas Jefferson
+1Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
- Abbott Joseph
+1To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.
- John Aikin
+1To hear one voice clearly, we must have freedom to hear them all.
- Kerry Brock
+1Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four letter word itself.
- Dick Cavett
+1The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
- Tommy Smothers
+1Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.
- Walter Cronkite
+1If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.
- Kingsley Amis
+1God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
- Rebecca West
+1If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
- Noam Chomsky
+1We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.
- Voltaire
+1Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
- Potter Stewart
+1A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.
- Albert Camus
+1I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech.
- Nancie J. Carmody
+1Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.
- Thurgood Marshall
+1Did 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
+1To 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
+1We 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
+1It is called the First Amendment. …Simple words marching in seried ranks. Compact, concise. To the point. Clear and pure. It’s freedom’s music.
- Jack Valenti
+1Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.
- Hugo L. Black
+1If 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
+1The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
- Henry Steele
+1Every 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
