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Censorship Quotes

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Censorship Quotes

“La historia no ha cambiado. Hace mil anos ellos eran los duenos del mundo. Hoy en dia lo siguen siendo. Claro, lo tienen que compartir con los grandes magnates de la tierra, esos que controlan el petroleo, las drogas, la tecnologia y por supuesto la television y la radio. La Iglesia domina los miedos y la promesa de la salvacion; las grandes empresas tambien manipulan los miedos y los paliativos para estos: la satisfaccion de las necesidades basicas - y las no tan basicas que hoy en dia parecen primordiales: carro, casa, belleza y entretenimiento - , una via directa al consimismo. Ambos en busca de lo mismo, la minipulacion del pueblo que los lleva a la gallina de los huevos de oro: el dinero de las masas. No es causalidad que la gente no quiera pensar. La Iglesia se encargo por siglos de esto, evitando la lectura de cualquier cosa que no fuese su religion. Desde Aristoteles, Ovidio, Pitagoras, Platon, Socrates, Antistenes, Heraclito, hasta Voltaire, Huxley, Hesse, Sade, Maquiavelo, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Dumas, entre otros, fueron censurados.”

ReligionCorporationsCensorshipConsumerismDominance
Book:Cóatl: el misterio de la serpiente
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“In Europe, nobody will bleep you, if you want to say a "bad" word on TV. The idea that some self-righteous little old lady at the FCC gets to tell other people which words they may or may not use, seems like a pretty strange concept in the rest of the civilized world. Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The War on Drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American War on Words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock and sound cool.”

CensorshipFreedom Of SpeechAmerican CultureForbidden FruitCensorship Of BooksForbidden KnowledgeWar On Drugs QuotesForbidden Words
Book:Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Going to New York
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“I proposed limits to tech’s addictive design features and reforms to confront tech’s political censorship. This followed from my efforts as Missouri attorney general to investigate Facebook (and Google) for antitrust and consumer protection violations. I was the first state attorney general in the nation to launch such a probe. Facebook, Inc. was not amused.”

PoliticalAddictionCensorshipNonfictionFacebookJosh HawleyThe Tyranny Of Big TechConsumer ProtectionAttorney General
Author:Josh Hawley
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“One of the biggest problems with so-called "cancel culture" is not the "cancelling" itself. Instead, it the crisis of imagination that exposes our collective inability to engage the complexities of social issues with nuance. What generally happens is that when there is any significant call for accountability and justice, it is uncritically deemed "cancel culture", pointing to the few extremes as "proof". Without question, ruthless public shaming and ostracization is never ultimately beneficial to all involved. However, that fact is too often forced through a binary lens that fails to address the individual and systemic issues at play, posit restorative/transformative consequences, and require better, more informed accountability. This is further complicated by the tendency of those with social privilege to lean into the rhetoric of "dialogue" and some variety of "bothsidesism" that fails to address underlying systemic imbalances of power and relative impact of social issues, all while policing tone and emotion as though anger and hurt are disqualifying. If there is a tendency for some to lean too strongly into "cancelling"- a legitimate issue that we need to address- it is largely because it is an attempt at correcting the over-emphasis on biased, normative systems that benefit the privileged and perpetuate harm.”

PrivilegeCensorshipNuanceCancel CultureNormativeCancelledCancelling
Author:Jamie Arpin-Ricci
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“To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize? We all know who it is that we are not permitted to criticize. We all know who it is that it is a sin to criticize. Sodomy is no longer a sin in America. Treason, and burning and spitting and urinating on the American flag is no longer a sin in America. Gross desecration of Catholic or Protestant religious symbols is no longer a sin in America. Cop-killing is no longer a sin in America - it is celebrated in rap "music." The degradation of beautiful young girls in disgusting pornography is no longer a sin in America. The killing by the multiple millions of the next generation in the womb is no longer a sin in America. But anti-semitism is the ultimate sin in America. But as things get worse and worse, we are losing our fear of this silly word. We all know who it is that controls the wealth of our nation through their exchanges and counting-houses in New York. We all know who it is that has deformed the minds of two generations of Americans with their television programs.”

TruthCensorshipTabooHeresyAnti SemitismThought CrimesMoney Rules The WorldThought Crime
Author:Kevin Alfred Strom
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“We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?”

ReadingCensorshipAmerican CultureReading QuotesSergio TroncosoSuperficial CultureChico Lingo Blog
Author:Sergio Troncoso
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“If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy ... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous ... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb." [Letter Addressed To The Addressers On The Late Proclamation, 1792 (Paine's response to the charge of "seditious libel" brought against him after the publication of The Rights of Man)]”

CensorshipFreedom Of SpeechLibelRights Of ManSedition
Book:The Thomas Paine Reader
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“ထုတ်ဝေရေးလောကမှာတော့ စိစစ်ရေးရုပ်သိမ်းလိုက်တဲ့အခါ အများကြီးပြောင်းလဲသွားတယ်။ ဒါပေမယ့် လာဘ်စားတဲ့ကိစ္စ၊ ခြစားတဲ့ကိစ္စတွေ ရေးရင်တော့ စိတ်မချရသေးဘူးလို့ ခံစားကြတယ်။ ယဉ်ကျေးမှုနဲ့ ဘာသာရေးကိစ္စမှာလဲ ဒီအတိုင်းပါပဲ။ ထိလို့မရသေးဘူး။ ပန်ဒိုရာ”

CensorshipMyanmarMyanmar Literature
Book:Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition
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“အခုဆိုရင် ဂျာနယ်တွေ ၃၀၀ လောက်ရှိနေပြီ။ အများစုက စီးပွားရေး၊ ကျန်းမာရေးပဲ။ အတွေးအခေါ်ပါတာ မများဘူး။ သဘောထားအမြင် ဖော်ပြတာနည်းတယ်။ မြန်မာပြည်မျာ စိစစ်ရေးမရှိတော့ဘူးဆိုပေမယ့် အစစ်အမှန်လွတ်လပ်မှု မရှိသေးဘူး။ အချက်အလက်တွေ တင်ပြတာမျိုးပဲ ရှိသေးတယ်။ ဒါက အစိုးရကြောင့်မဟုတ်၊ စာရေးသူတွေကိုယ်တိုင် ဦးနှောက်ထဲမှာ ထိန်းချုပ်မှုတွေ ဝေဝဲနေဆဲမို့ပါပဲ။”

CensorshipMyanmarMyanmar Literature
Book:Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition
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“Our Younger Stalins cabinet stands in the corner. It holds photographs of our vozhd taken ten to twenty years ago. When possible, we substitute a Younger Stalin for current ones. It's essential we convey to the people the youthful vigor of their elder statesman. The longer we do it, the further back in time we must go to find new material. Readers of certain periodicals may worry that he is growing younger with each passing year; by his seventieth birthday he will be a slender-faced adolescent.”

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Book:The Tsar of Love and Techno
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“In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers: A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. Only one or two years after Orwell’s death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.”

RussiaCommunismCensorshipTotalitarianismGeorge OrwellNineteen Eighty FourCzeslaw Milosz
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.”

RussiaSocialismCommunismCensorshipTotalitarianismGeorge OrwellNineteen Eighty Four
Author:Czesław Miłosz
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“Isaac Deutscher was best known—like his compatriot Joseph Conrad—for learning English at a late age and becoming a prose master in it. But, when he writes above, about the ‘fact’ that millions of people ‘may’ conclude something, he commits a solecism in any language. Like many other critics, he judges Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a novel or even as a polemic, but by the possibility that it may depress people. This has been the standard by which priests and censors have adjudged books to be lacking in that essential ‘uplift’ which makes them wholesome enough for mass consumption. The pretentious title of Deutscher’s essay only helps to reinforce the impression of something surreptitious being attempted.”

CensorshipLiterary CriticismGeorge OrwellNineteen Eighty FourIsaac Deutscher
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia…to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy…good writing stops.”

WritingLiteraturePoliticsHistoryCommunismCensorshipWwiiNational Socialism
Book:The Prevention of Literature
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“... bias in training materials is inevitable and there are better ways to deal with adverse effects than to scrub them out of existence. Efforts to eliminate bias would simply create new kinds of bias and distort the validity of the original datasets. Bias can be unjust by some standards but serves a useful purpose. ... the way to deal with it is to use other systems developed by those not involved in the original code, assisted by subject matter experts who could spot damaging bias in AI output and mitigate it in a commonsense manner. The way to deal with bias is not to eliminate it (you can't) but to identify bias and take it into account. Again, education and accountability are better than censorship and new biases.”

EducationAiCensorshipBiasHumanity And SocietyInformation TechnologyMachine LearningSystems DesignLlm AiData Architecture
Book:MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy
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“The bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico...The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did...There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time...”

CensorshipFirst AmendmentPolitical CorrectnessPc Culture
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“The bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico...The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did...There you have it Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”

MinoritiesCensorshipPolitical CorrectnessPc Culture
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“Every day, librarians enforce copyright policies that we may disagree with and that, in some ways, run contrary to the values of our profession. Every day, librarians must decide between a desire to preserve the privacy of our community members and offering services our communities demand. Every day, librarians must make a choice between doing what’s easy, doing what’s right, and determining what’s right in the first place. No textbook or mission statement or policy document can relieve us of the necessity to make those decisions, nor remove the complexity of those decisions. That’s why we are librarians and why librarians are professionals, not clerks. That’s why we are stewards within the communities we serve, not servants to them. That’s why we must shape the missions and the work of our organizations and communities, and not simply accept them.”

BooksLibraryCensorshipReadersCopyrightMission StatementLibrarianshipPolicies
Book:The New Librarianship Field Guide
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“Of course it was not only the law that interfered with our management of the paper. The politicians, too, soon took a hand. The Oberpräsident of Schleswig-Holstein, a man named Kürbis (which is German for pumpkin) forbad its publication; it appeared the next day, entitled Die Westküste [The West Coat]. This too was banned, and for a short time my brother's wish was fulfilled and we edited Die Grüne Front. I, too, had the gratification of seeing my original suggestion realised whn it became, in due course, Die Sturmglocke. Finally, the Oberpräsident forbad us from publishing any paper at all which was not purely concerned with technical agricultural matters. So we rechristened it Der Kürbis, aand the leading article consisted of variations on the subject of pumpking as given in the encyclopaedia; we expatiated on how pumkins flourish best in plenty of dung and on the disagreeable nature of their blossom's scwent. Thenceforth the paper resumed its original name of Das Landvolk and that was that.”

HistoryGermanyCensorshipWeimar Republic
Book:Der Fragebogen
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“Every word serves a purpose. It conveys an idea. And the idea behind words like feces, stool, or poop is exactly the same as behind the word shit. They all conjure up the same mental image in your head. So why are stool and poop "good" words, and shit is a "bad" word? Who decided that, and why am I bound by that decision?”

CensorshipFreedom Of SpeechAmerican CultureFreethinkerAmericansShitCensorship Of BooksCensorship Quotes
Book:Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Going to New York
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“Medical studies have shown that cursing reduces levels of stress and pain. Repressing your anger is not healthy. It's much better to verbalize it, and let off steam. Maybe all that repressed anger is the reason why there are so many serial killers in America.”

CensorshipAmerican CultureStress ReliefAmericansCursingFuckCensorship QuotesRepressed EmotionsRepressed FeelingsRepressed Anger
Book:Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Going to New York
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