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Censorship Quotes

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Censorship Quotes

“В газетах сообщалось, что по предложению выдающегося сталинского соратника Постышева вводится новый праздник — Новый год с елкой. [...] Мама сказала: — Вот, Толя, какой ты везучий. Только пошел учиться — построили тебе новую школу, открыли агростанцию и ДТС, ввели елку, даже асфальт вам проложили, — только учитесь. Ты пользуйся этим и учись, но только читай побольше, читай и читай, в книгах — мудрость. Однако очень скоро выяснилось, что в книгах не все мудрость. Как-то на уроке нам велели раскрыть учебники на странице с портретом Постышева и эту страницу вырвать: Постышев оказался врагом народа. И его расстреляли, хоть он и елочку принес. Для наших детских мозгов это было потрясением, но нам и сообразить не дали, сразу сделали это системой, чем-то обыкновенным и привычным. То велели вырывать новые страницы, то — густо замазывать чернилами какие-то строчки и имена. Портить учебники — это было даже весело, это всем ужасно понравилось [87].”

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Book:Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel
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“Are we to deny our daughters the works of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck or Shakespeare?....Where is the equality in banning girls from enjoying wonderful works of literature?....What kind of society defines suitable reading material by sex? This is indefensible censorship encouraging ignorance and bias. [About Caitlin Moran's statement.]”

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Author:Diane Davies
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“Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned.”

IdeasPhilosophyBooksCommunismCensorshipNazism
Book:Do You Think You're Clever?: The Oxford and Cambridge Questions
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“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, powerless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”

ReligionKnowledgeIgnoranceDestructionIndividualityConformityCensorship
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for the shore.”

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Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts the lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

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Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ. Every few hundred years, he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up, he sprang out of the ashes; he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly things we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”

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Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“And hold onto one thought: You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And some day, we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steam shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”

ReligionKnowledgeIgnoranceDestructionIndividualityConformityCensorship
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“But that’s what they do with everything inconvenient in history— either label it as some freak event, or as irrelevant surface details. The only reason their theories even seem consistent is that they’ve presented a version of history rendered into reductive pap, with more lies of omission than facts. They simply can’t allow themselves to acknowledge that history’s basically nothing but messy absurdities, and that there is no inevitable path to it. Every shape will fit into a round hole if you carve it and hammer it enough.”

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Book:The Siege of Skyhold
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“[T]here is another side to this Christian story, one that is worlds away from the bookish monks and careful copyists of legend. It is a far less glorious tale of how some philosophers were beaten, tortured, interrogated and exiled and their beliefs forbidden; it is a story of how intellectuals set light to their own libraries in fear. And it is above all a story that is told by absences: of how literature lost its liberty; how certain topics dropped from philosophical debate – and then started to vanish from the pages of history. It is a story of silence.”

PhilosophyFearFreedomSilenceChristianityDestructionCensorshipMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic bomb was dropped, did not have the movable type for 'atomic bomb' or 'radioactivity'. The silence continued so long because the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team in the fall of 1945 had issued a mistaken statement: all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the atomic bomb had by then already died; accordingly, no further cases of physiological effects due to residual radiation would be acknowledged.”

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Author:Kenzaburō Ōe
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“They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

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Book:The Martian Chronicles
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“If truth is not to be spoken, Sir, in a government, calling itself free, least it should be understood by the people, who are governed; and prevent their freely supplying the oil, that facilitates the movement of the cumbrous machine—If facts, which cannot be denied, be repressed; and reason, which cannot be controverted, be stifled; the time is not far distant, when such a country may say, adieu liberty!”

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Book:Desmond
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“Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.”

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Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”

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Book:Essays
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“يبدو أننا قد اعتدنا أسلوب الوصاية في كل شيء، حتى الأمور الفكرية الخاصة، بل إن وصايتهم الفكرية علينا كشعوب هي ما مكنهم من استعبادنا طوال هذه المدة. إنها الحلقة الأولى والأقوى التي مكنتهم من التحكم في مصيرنا، ولن نتحرر إلا إذا ما تحررنا فكرياً.”

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Book:صراع الأقنعة
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“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.”

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Book:Death of the Liberal Class
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“I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

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Book:Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion
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“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Every man — in the development of his own personality — has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature." [Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]”

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Book:The System of Freedom of Expression
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“Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to "Don Quixote"—have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine. Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy soul is thine own and thy will as free as any man's, whate'er he be, thou art in thine own house and master of it as much as the king of his taxes and thou knowest the common saying, "Under my cloak I kill the king;" all which exempts and frees thee from every consideration and obligation, and thou canst say what thou wilt of the story without fear of being abused for any ill or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of it.”

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Book:Don Quixote
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“Jeg haver ofte recommenderet Friehed i at skrive, og anseet de publiqve Censurer som Baand og Lænker for den Lærde Verden. Jeg haver alleene holdet for, at Skrive-Friehed ikke burde tillades uden dem, der have naaet en moed Alder; og er jeg der udi bleven bestyrket, efterdi jeg paa nogen Tiid haver seet unge Personer, førend de have faaet Skiæg paa Hagen, at føre Pennen i de delicateste Materier saavel politiske som moralske. Det er om saadanne, som man bør sige med David:Lader dem blive i Jericho, indtil deres Skiægge voxe.”

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Book:Epistler
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“A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.”

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Book:The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the 21st Century
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