Censorship Quotes That Will Make You █████

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
– Salman Rushdie, In Good Faith

“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”
– Potter Stewart, Dissenting to Ginzburg v. United States

“If you live in self-punishment or self-imposed ignorance or lack of self-awareness it genuinely diminishes your existence. Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.”
– Ai Weiwei, Truth to Power

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: His Life as He Wrote it

“The principle [of censorship] is wrong. It’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t have steak.”
– Robert A. Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon

“Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Letter to Charles McCarthy

“Censorship is the child of fear. the father of ignorance. and the desperate weapon of fascists everywhere.”
– Laurie Halse Anderson, SHOUT

“All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States – and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!”
– Kurt Vonnegut

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
– George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”
– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.”
– Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 24: 1 June–31 December 1792

“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 sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.”
– Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education

“But it’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”
– Judy Blume, Judy Blume Talks About Censorship

“The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.”
– Tommy Smothers

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.”
– Nadine Gordimer

“The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.”
– Max Lerner

“Among people who have learned something from the 18th century (say, Voltaire) it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended.”
– Noam Chomsky, Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”
–  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“We’re getting the language into its final shape – the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”
– George Orwell, 1984

“If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”
– George Orwell, Free Speech for Me – But Not for Thee (attributed)

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”
– George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
– Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy

“The German Censors —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— Idiots —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——”
– Heinrich Heine, Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand

“Media censorship is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, but with an enormous increase in flows of information, it becomes increasingly difficult for any state to completely curb news coverage before it reaches the public.”
– Qiuqing Tai, China’s Media Censorship: A Dynamic and Diversified Regime

“We believe that access is a fundamental right, and it’s very sad if it’s denied to citizens of Egypt or any country.”
– David Drummond

“The internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.”
– John Perry Barlow

“There is no ‘right’ way to do internet censorship, and the best version of a bad idea remains a bad idea.”
– Julian Sanchez

“Thank god my husband had to shake his porn habit after he got here.”
– Nellie Yellow, Why we’re staying in China (when asked about internet access)