#censorship

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#chain-reactions #control #fear #political-bias #religious-prejudice

I know the fashion is that everything is fair game [for comedy material] but I don't believe that. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#self-censorship #censorship

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#dictators #illiteracy #reading #censorship

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#free-speech #freedom

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line. ↗

— Langston Hughes

#begins #being #black #censorship #color

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing. ↗

— Penn Jillette

#beavis #censorship #did #down #i

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble. ↗

— Peter S. Jennison

#censorship #education #illiteracy #reading #education

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#freedom #freedom

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#evil #first-amendment #freedom #freedom-of-speech #hubris

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail. ↗

— Laurence Sterne

#reading #writing #life