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.
Art made tongue-tied by authority.
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.
Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.
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.
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
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.
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.
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
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.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
Instead of asking — ''How much damage will the work in question bring about?'' why not ask — ''How much good? How much joy?''
It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.
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.
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.
One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else; the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed.
Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.