Every burned book enlightens the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
Tommy Smothers
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
John Morley
If your library is not ‘unsafe’, it probably isn’t doing its job.
John Berry
I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
Mae West
Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.
Mark Twain
The trouble with censors is that they worry if a girl has cleavage. They ought to worry if she hasn’t any.
Marilyn Monroe
If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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 paper burns, but the words fly away.
Akiba ben Joseph
[O]ne man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.
John Marshall Harlan
Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.
Phil Kerby
Free speech not only lives, it rocks!
Oprah Winfrey
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw
To hear one voice clearly, we must have freedom to hear them all.
Kerry Brock
The 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 Commager
This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.
Euripides
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
Censorship offends me.
Quotesjunction.com
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
Voltaire
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ”
Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky
The ultimate form of censorship is assassination.
George Bernard Shaw
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heinrich Heine
Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
Potter Stewart
The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.
David Ben-Gurion
Books won’t stay banned -
Ideas won’t go to jail.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Walt Whitman
Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship.
Ben Lindsey
The 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 Steel Commager
Burning is no answer.
Camille Desmoulins’ reply to Robespierre
If the human body’s obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.
Larry Flynt
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.
Lillian Hellman
I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech.
Nancie J. Carmody
If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
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
Advertisers, not governments, are the primary censors of media content in the United States today.
C. Edwin Baker
Censorship is advertising paid by the government.
Federico Fellini
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
Gen William C. Westmoreland
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
Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.
Dick Cavett
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
Censorship: the reaction of the ignorant to freedom.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
Censorship is the very wall that holds creativity back from complete freedom; because
without Exposure to the good and the bad, the acceptable and inappropriate, and the offensive and polite, how will the mind thrive for more than what is given?
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
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire
He is always the severest censor of the merit of others who has the least worth of his own.
Elias Lyman Maggon