Evergreen Review, underground magazine; Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller; Naked Lunch, William Burroughs; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Freedom to Love, a film by Drs Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen; Anonymous: A Man with a Maid, one of the most famous underground novels of Victorian England; The Correct Sadist, Terence Sellers; I am Curious (yellow), Lena Nyman. ibid.
If anybody can look at these pictures and tell me that they have any relationship to art, I question that person’s judgment. Gerald R Ford, re Evergreen magazine
Who wants to read book after book sprinkled with four-letter words? Alfred A Knopf
cf.
The word has never been written or uttered which should not be covered. Barney Rosset
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings. Salman Rushdie
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. Salman Rushdie
The fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don’t like. It’s completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and you proceed. There is no way of creating a free society where nobody says anything that others don’t like. If offendness is the point at which you have to limit your thoughts then nothing can be said. There might be people who might be offended by various kinds of literature. I myself, I am not very fond of, let me not mention Chetan Bhagat, I wasn’t going to say that, so I have not. And yet, I believe such writer have a right to publish, and of course to live. The point is behind these ideas of offendness and respect there is always the threat of violence. Always the threat is if you do that which disrespect or offends me I will be violent to you and so the real subject is not religion, its violence. Salman Rushdie
When you publish a book, you do so in part to end the silence. All censorship is silence. I would never, as an author, feel right requiring a young person whose family would object to the book to read it. Just as I would never force that person to read it, I would ask those folks to not force others not to read it. To me, that is just good manners. Stephen Chbosky
Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. Potter Stewart
I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it. Mae West
Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. Henry Steele Commager
As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends. Jeremy Bentham
Censorship is the height of vanity. Martha Graham
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. Noam Chomsky
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. Noam Chomsky
I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it’s not censorship. Penn Jillette
There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it’s going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it. Frank Zappa
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. George Orwell, Why I Write
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 publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves. George Orwell
A large class of readers ... will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only – a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletive with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does – what feeling it spares – what horror it conceals. Charlotte Brontë, introduction to Emily’s Wuthering Heights
It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers. Judy Blume
Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blancmange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, Coda (1979 edition)
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Dwight D Eisenhower
New laws surrounding censorship and copyright gave authors more freedom and commercial opportunity than before. Henry Hitchings, Birth of the British Novel, BBC 2011
If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. F D Roosevelt
If we start throwing up walls against what some of us think is obscene, we may very well wake up one morning and realise that walls have been thrown in all kinds of places we never expected. The People vs Larry Flint 1996 starring Woody Harrelson & Courtney Love & Cody Block & Edward Norton & Richard Paul & James Cromwell & Donna Hanover & Crispin Glover & Vincent Schiavelli & Brett Harrelson & Ryan Post et al, director Milos Forman, Norton
Censors are dead men
set up to judge between life and death.
For no live, sunny man would be a censor,
He’d just laugh. D H Lawrence, Censors, 1929
Welcome to the hidden history of Britain. Banned in the UK is an alternative journey through an era when Big Brother decided what we could see, hear, say or do: sex and politics, violence and vulgarity, this is the forbidden story of what they tried to ban. Banned in the UK I, Channel 4 2005
1980s: 5 notorious bans: ‘video nasties was a term coined by Mary Whitehouse’ … 1984 The Video Recordings Act which banned a host of films … the infamous Texas Chainsaw Massacre … Mary Whitehouse called The Evil Dead the number one nasty … Banned from the Cinema and the tele: Derek & Clive … Ian Dury’s Spasticus Autisticus … The first casualty of the [Falklands] conflict was the reporting of the conflict itself … The Romans in Britain: ‘simulated rape’ … ibid.
A bizarre world where Myra Hindley meets Paul Merson: football and murder: this is the story of what the censors tried to ban. Banned in the UK II
The late 80s: Raves: ‘a bill to curb acid house parties has been given an unopposed second reading in the Commons’ … ‘The Broadcasting Act was introduced banning 13 organisations from the airwaves’ … Football hooligans: ‘The English disease’ … Beastie Boys: ‘The nastiest band in the world arrive in London’ … Spycatcher: ‘one of the most remarkable breaches of security’ … Satanic Verses: ‘criminally dull’ … Clause 28: ‘ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools’ … Visions of Ecstasy: ‘Jesus and a nun with lipstick’ … Secret Society: ‘the secret was called Zircon, a spy satellite’ … ibid.
The early 1990s revealing the sordid secrets the censor tried to ban. Banned in the UK III
The government fed us flame-grilled woppers … The Spanner Trial: R v Brown … British beef … Dangerous Dogs … Boy Meets Girl … Celebrity football bans … The manager [George Graham] was taking kick-backs … Sicko comic books … ibid.
The late 1990s: a time when Britain’s youth culture ran riot and drinking Alcopops became a national sport. Banned in the UK IV
Beaver Espana … [David Cronenberg’s] Crash … Kids … Alcopops … Corporal punishment … Gays in the military … Brit Art … Robert Mapplethorpe [photography] … David Hamilton [photography] … handguns … ibid.