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Censor, n. An officer of certain governments, employed to supress the works of genius. Among the Romans the censor was an inspector of public morals, but the public morals of modern nations will not bear inspection.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, 1967
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The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventhday Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who
sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/451/451.html
-Ray Bradbury, [In the coda to a 1979 edition of the book Fahrenheit 451]
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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.
-Robertson Davies
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You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
-Leonardo DaVinci
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It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
-William O. Douglas
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The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.
-James T. Farrell
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Censorship is advertising paid by the government.
-Federico Fellini
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What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
-Sigmund Freud, Referring to the public burning of his books in Berlin. Letter to Ernest Jones (1933)
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We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
-D.W. (David Wark) Griffith, “A Plea for the Art of the Motion Picture,” prologue, released as The Birth of a Nation (1915)
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Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-Heinrich Heine
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The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
-Robert A. Heinlein, [on censorship]
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Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
-Samuel Johnson, Rambler #2, March 24, 1750
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Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.
-Clare Boothe Luce
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The trouble with censors is that they worry if a girl has a cleavage; they ought to worry if she hasn’t any.
-Marilyn Monroe
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Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
-George Bernard Shaw
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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 censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.
-George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession
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Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.
-Mae West
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Books about Censorship
