Censorship

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CENSORSHIP: To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is todeclare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. (Claude Adrien Helvetius, French philosopher, freemason, and writer, 1715-1771)

CENSORSHIP: We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would still be an evil. (John Stuart Mill, British philosopher, political economist, and civil servant, 1806-1873)

CENSORSHIP: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. (Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and playwright, 1854-1900)

CENSORSHIP: Every burned book enlightens the world. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, U.S. essayist, poet, and philosopher who led the transcendentalist movement, 1803-1882)

CENSORSHIP: You censure this with difficulty because you have allowed it to become customary (St. Jerome, Dalmatian Roman Catholic priest best known for his translation of most of the Bible into Latin347-420)

CENSORSHIP: No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. (Thomas Jefferson, one of the U.S. Founders who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and later served as the third President of the United States, 1743-1826)

CENSORSHIP: Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there. (Clare Boothe Luce, U.S. author, politician, first U.S. woman appointed to a major ambassadorial post abroad, 1903-1987)

CENSORSHIP: If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome, we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero. (Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer and philosopher, 1694-1778)

CENSORSHIP: The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. (Walt Whitman, U.S. essayist, journalist,and poet, known as the Father of Free Verse, 1819-1992)