Quote: You can cage the singer but not the song.
Author: Harry Belafonte 1927-, American Actor and Singer
Quote: Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
Author: Arnold Bennett 1867-1931, British Novelist
Quote: Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.
Author: Thomas Bowdler 1754-1825, British Physician, Editor
Quote: This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.
Author: British Board of Film
Quote: The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Author: Willa Cather 1876-1947, American Author
Quote: Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
Author: David Cronenberg 1943-, Canadian Filmmaker
Quote: One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else; the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed.
Author: Edgar Dale
Quote: Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist
Quote: No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
Author: Anatole France 1844-1924, French Writer
Quote: 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.
Author: Nadine Gordimer 1923-, South African Author
Quote: 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?
Author: Mervyn Griffith-Jones
Quote: 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.
Author: David Wark Griffiths 1875-1948, American Pioneer Film Director
Quote: Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.
Author: Heinrich Heine 1797-1856, German Poet, Journalist
Quote: It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.
Author: Samuel Johnson 1709-1784, British Author
Quote: No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.
Author: Samuel Johnson 1709-1784, British Author
Quote: They can't censor the gleam in my eye.
Author: Charles Laughton
Quote: The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
Author: D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930, British Author
Quote: The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Author: Max Lerner 1902-, American Author, Columnist
Quote: We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ''censorship,'' we call it ''concern for commercial viability.''
Author: David Mamet 1947-, American Playwright
Quote: If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.
Author: Herman Melville 1819-1891, American Author
Quote: It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.
Author: Klemens Von Metternich 1773-1859, Austrian Statesman
Quote: Instead of asking -- ''How much damage will the work in question bring about?'' why not ask -- ''How much good? How much joy?''
Author: Henry Miller 1891-1980, American Author
Quote: As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
Author: John Milton 1608-1674, British Poet
Quote: Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.
Author: Sean O'Casey 1884-1964, Irish Dramatist
Quote: 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.
Author: Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Spanish Artist
Quote: When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.
Author: Jacques Prevert 1900-1977, French Poet
Quote: Art made tongue-tied by authority.
Author: William Shakespeare 1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor
Quote: Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.
Author: George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist
Quote: I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.
Author: Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1918-, Russian Novelist
Quote: Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.
Author: Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1918-, Russian Novelist
Quote: If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
Author: Evelyn Waugh 1903-1966, British Novelist
Quote: 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.
Author: Mae West 1892-1980, American Actress
Quote: I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
Author: William Butler Yeats 1865-1939, Irish Poet, Playwright.