Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the
long run of history the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The
only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
A. Whitney Griswold
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities
from themselves and others. Their fear is only their inability to face
what is real. Somewhere in their upbringing they were shielded against
the total facts of our experience. They were only taught to look one
way when many ways exist.
Charles Bukowski
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 Helvetius
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of
ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
Max Lerner
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world
its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will
determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate
discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor
must preside at our assemblies.
William O. Douglas
Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all
subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat
us.
William O. Douglas
Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.
William O. Douglas
Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow
protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets
for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed
merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the
unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution of way of
life, or say and so things that make people think.
William O. Douglas
The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat
falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas
The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the
degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.
James Farrell
All despotisms should be considered problems of mental hygiene, and all
support of censorship should be considered as problems of abnormal
psychology
Theodore Schroeder
Censorship always protects and perpetuates every horror of the prevailing
forms of oppression. With us, its subtle disguises increase its evils
by creating delusions of safety, liberty and democracy. It precludes
that intelligence which is necessary to hasten wholesome and natural
social evolution.
Theodore Schroeder
All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current
conceptions and existing institutions.
George Bernard Shaw
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or
expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has
always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of
its time.
Joseph Lewis
We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that
books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton
Liberty of thought means liberty to communicate one's thought.
Salvador de Madariaga
Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest
form of cowardice.
Holbrook Jackson
Censorship is like an appendix. When inert, it is useless; when active
it is extremely dangerous.
Maurice Edelman
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly
concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest, and cowardice.
John Osborne
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
Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial
regions, which waft away the elements of disease, and bring new elements
of health; and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death
comes fast.
Henry Ward Beecher
There is nothing that dies so hard and rallies so often as intolerance.
The vices and passions which it summons to its support are the most
ruthless and the most persistent harbored in the human breast. They
sometimes sleep but they never seem to die. Anything, any extraordinary
situation, any unnecessary controversy, may light those fires again and
plant in our republic that which has destroyed every republic which
undertook to nurse it.
William E. Borah
No more fatuous chimera ever infested the brain of man than that you can
control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious
sentiment ever tormented the human heart than the barbarous desire to do so.
William E. Borah
I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their
position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual
and moral cowards.
William E. Borah
If the press is not free, if speech is not independent and untrammeled,
if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no
difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and
not a citizen.
William E. Borah
Without free speech no search for truth is possible; without free speech,
no discovery of truth is useful.
Charles Bradlaugh
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the government's purposes are beneficient. Men born to freedom are
naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis D. Brandeis
In America - as elsewhere - free speech is confined to the dead.
Mark Twain
Any question about what's at stake here? Visit some of these sites to find out what the new Comstocks would like to censor.
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Copyright © 1996-8 by Charles Daney, All Rights Reserved
Last updated: February 28, 1998