#censor

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#actions #censored #change #character #dangerous

The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. ↗

— Milos Forman

#because #censorship #character #control #destroys

To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#freedom-of-the-press #freedom

Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled...The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism that, it is argued, has finally been able to tear from man's eyes the shrouds imposed by mystical thought, religion, and such powerful illusions as freedom and dignity. Science has given us this great victory over ignorance. But, on closer examination, this victory too can be seen as an Orwellian triumph of an even higher ignorance: what we have gained is a new conformism, which permits us to say anything that can be said in the functional languages of instrumental reason, but forbids us to allude to...the living truth...so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its 'objective' manipulations, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality. ↗

— Joseph Weizenbaum

#conformism #rationalism #age

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves. ↗

— Geraldine Brooks

#books #censorship #censorship

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#digression #philosophy #reading #wit #writing

What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship. ↗

— Matthew Lesko

#always #been #censorship #forefront #libraries

And in the Second World War, you didn't just read about it in the newspapers because you weren't allowed to read it in the newspapers. It was all censored, you know? So nobody knew what we were doing. ↗

— Patrick Macnee

#allowed #because #censored #doing #just

After he was assassinated, his family and the men who had served him continued the lying and began the destruction, censoring and hiding of JFK's medical records. ↗

— Richard Reeves

#assassinated #began #censoring #continued #destruction

I wouldn't totally rule out doing Letterman or the Tonight Show if I had a set that I just happened to write that I thought was funny but was still appropriate for network censors. But I'm not going to go out of my way. ↗

— Joe Rogan

#censors #doing #funny #go #going