• "You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
  -- Charles Austin Beard

  
  

• "As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything."
  -- Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, French comedy writer

  
  

• "If censorship reigns there cannot be sincere flattery, and only small men are afraid of small writings."
  -- Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, French comedy writer

  
  

• "REVOLUTION, n. A bursting of the boilers which usually takes place when the safety valve of public discussion is closed."
  -- Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary (1906)

  
  

• "I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual and moral cowards."
  -- William E. Borah

  
  

• "Without free speech no search for truth is possible; without free speech, no discovery of truth is useful."
  -- Charles Bradlaugh

  
  

• "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
  -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

  
  

• "The press is easier to strangle than to look in the eyes."
  -- Winston Churchill

  
  

• "Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
  -- William O. Douglas

  
  

• "Every burned book enlightens the world."
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  
  

• "Censorship is advertising paid by the government."
  -- Federico Fellini, Italian film director

  
  

• "Even to the present day, we so often condemn books that were written to fight the very things we claim to be fighting. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is so often cited as being racist, when it was written against slavery and racism."
  -- Jamey Fletcher

  
  

• "Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant'."
  -- Robert Anson Heinlein, "A Rabble in Arms"

  
  

• "A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
  -- Granville Hicks

  
  

• "Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest of cowardice."
  -- Holbrook Jackson

  
  

• "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
  -- Clare Booth Luce, American playwright and diplomat

  
  

• "Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
  -- Thurgood Marshall

  
  

• "Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
  -- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, American playwright

  
  

• "Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."
  -- George Orwell

  
  

• "All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships."
  -- George Bernard Shaw

  
  

• "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
  -- George Bernard Shaw

  
  

• "All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions."
  -- George Bernard Shaw

  
  

• "Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime."
  -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

  
  

• "Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
  -- William C. Westmoreland, General and U.S. military commander