#censor

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. ↗

— Mark Twain

#censorship

The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#culture-wars #political-correctness #procrustes #censorship

Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship. ↗

— Michael Anti

#china #weibo #censorship

Irreverence is our only sacred cow. ↗

— Paul Krassner

#satire #censorship

I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important. ↗

— Bernardo Bertolucci

#am #any #been #censorship #i

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. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#brand #censorship #experienced #forever #imagination

There should be no censorship of mail. ↗

— Barbara Deming

#mail #should

You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#comedy #religion #sex #tv #religion

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#free-speech #progress #challenge

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless. ↗

— Chris Hedges

#media #patriotism #truth #war #death