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“The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible."

[Defend the right to be offended (openDemocracy, 7 February 2005)]”
― Salman Rushdie

“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

[Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]”
― Louis Brandeis

“If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.”
― Ice-T

“In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.

[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938]”
― Mikhail Bulgakov

“If you accept â€� and I do â€� that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said. The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made. People making art find out where the limits of free expression are by going beyond them and getting into trouble. [...] The Law is a blunt instrument. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.”
― Chris Crutcher, Angry Management

“When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”
― David Leavitt

“Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned.”
― John Farndon, Do You Think You're Clever?: The Oxford and Cambridge Questions

“That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.”
― Timothy Garton Ash

“If the partridge didn't call at the wrong moment, Neither the hunter nor the falcon would know of it. It follows from this point also, That everyone's voice betrays him.”
― Rahman Baba, The Poetry of Rahman Baba: Poet of the Pakhtuns

“Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.”
― Martin Baker

“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, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation

“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, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“Controlling the internet is a powerful tool for increasingly confident autocracies.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“For every classical work that sat comfortably with Christian minds and morals, there was another that grated unbearably on them. ‘Carmen 16â€� by the poet Catullus was a particular thorn. This poem opens with the infamously bracing line: ‘I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouthsâ€� â€� hardly the sort of thing to gladden the heart of Basil. ‘Epigram 1.90â€� of Martial was little better: this little verse attacks a woman for having affairs with other women. Or, as Martial put it: 'You improvised, by rubbing cunts together, And using that bionic clit of yours To counterfeit the thrusting of a male.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“... purist and yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children”
― Toni Morrison

“He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes–make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!”
― Aldous Huxley

“All art is valid. Even religious art. Even sacrilegious art. Even risqué art. Even gory art. Even bad art. Even AI art. Try not to confuse freedom with privilege. Ask yourself often, what are you fighting for exactly?”
― Xenith Sanguine

“The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.â€� Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”
― George Orwell, Essays

“The indoctrinated would rather hear nothing than hear anything at all.”
― Wyatt B. Pringle, Jr.

“The woke live in a world protected by a parental media.”
― Wyatt B. Pringle, Jr.

“...someone asking for the Roald Dahls - the ones before they had made the giant average-size, and Augustus Gloop suffering from a glandular disorder...”
― Jenny Colgan, Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop

“...it was neither "anguish" nor "discomfort" that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Mary Jo Godwin, former editor of the late Wilson Library Bulletin, once wrote: "A truly great library has something in it to offend everyone." But libraries don't buy books in order to offend. We buy them to support our community. It surprises some people that not everyone wants the same thing.”
― James LaRue, On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US

“One day, while walking through the frozen aisle at the grocery story, I saw a bunch of packages with clear labeling: brussels sprouts. I went up to the store manage, whom I knew. "Brussels sprouts offend me!" I told him. "Don't I deserve the right to come into a store and not see a product that offends me?"
He thought about it.
Then he said, "Nobody comes to the grocery store because it doesn't have what they don't want." He paused. "Some people like brussels sprouts."
It's the same with a library.”
― James LaRue, On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US

“To shame someone out of writing is a modern book burning—an abortion of ideas, killed in the womb of enlightenment.”
― Scott McCarthy