The Galaxy of Quotes

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

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'?

There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.

The public have an insatiable curiousity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

I never knew a girl who was ruined by a book.

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.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters -- because girls can read as well as boys -- reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

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.

Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

Art made tongue-tied by authority.