The prime goal of censorship is to promote ignorance, whether it is done via lying and bowdlerized school texts or by attacking individual books.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody read." [As quoted in (in , Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]
By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.
Even a very brief tape-delay introduces a form of censorship into the broadcast - not direct governmental control, but it means that a network representative is in effect guessing at what a government might tolerate, which can be even worse.
They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.
There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
There was something so unutterably ridiculous about the sight of a US company deleting posts accusing it of censorship that many other people began to protest.
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.
Storytelling is the only studio movie where the censorship is perfectly clear, the only studio movie with a big red box covering up a shot. I take pride in that - and, of course, in having avoided the fate of Eyes Wide Shut.
I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.
Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)
Whenever it's suggested that our sponsors have some kind of influence or control of what we cover in some kind of censorship through financial pressure, it's rubbish. That's never happened.
When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
In China, the rules of the market are not always that transparent. So it's very hard. Also, the national TV networks are all owned by the government, so our shows are subject to censorship by the networks. Every now and then, we are told that certain...
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.
It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut...
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.
We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.
