Censorship.

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“Without free speech no search for truth is possible… no discovery of truth is useful… Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.”
– Charles Bradlaugh

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ”
– Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)

“Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
– Winston Churchill

“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion…”
– Henry Steel Commager

“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. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.”
– Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education

“[O]ne man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”
– John Marshall Harlan, Supreme Court justice, 1971

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
– Lillian Hellman, subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1952

“To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.”
– Claude Adrien Helvetius, De l’Homme, Vol. I, sec. 4

“The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be… Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.”
– Granville Hicks (1901-1982)

“Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.”
– Holbrook Jackson

“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

“Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas. – Censure acquits the raven, but pursues the dove.”
– Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Satires, II. 63. Roman rhetorician and satirical poet (1st to 2nd cent. A.D.)

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – Who will watch the watchers?”
– Juvenal

Rock on.

Technorati Tags: Censorship, Quotes

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