(53 votes)   We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ''censorship,'' we call it ''concern for commercial viability.''

David Mamet
1947-, American Playwright

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(52 votes)   Art made tongue-tied by authority.

William Shakespeare
1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor

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(48 votes)   I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

William Butler Yeats
1865-1939, Irish Poet, Playwright.

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(46 votes)   As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

John Milton
1608-1674, British Poet

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(45 votes)   I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
1918-, Russian Novelist

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(45 votes)   No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(45 votes)   The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

D. H. Lawrence
1885-1930, British Author

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(39 votes)   Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist

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(34 votes)   Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

Pablo Picasso
1881-1973, Spanish Artist

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(29 votes)   It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(23 votes)   If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.

Herman Melville
1819-1891, American Author

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(20 votes)   Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(18 votes)   Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.

Sean O'Casey
1884-1964, Irish Dramatist

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(18 votes)   We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue -- the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

David Wark Griffiths
1875-1948, American Pioneer Film Director

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(15 votes)   This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.

British Board of Film

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