Censorship Quotes – Reflections on Information Control

"Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event"

Walter Lippmann

"Censorship is the living confession of the powerful that they can only trample on dumb slaves, but cannot govern free peoples. Censorship is something that stands far beneath the executioner, for the same ray of enlightenment that sixty years ago helped the executioner achieve honesty has recently branded censorship with the stigma of contempt."

Johann Nepomuk Nestroy

"A fact-checking agency often serves as an instrument of censorship. The reason someone finances such an agency is to review and control certain press products and other media. The main motivation behind it is to instill in the public what is true or false, and to portray others' statements as questionable, obscure, or unreliable. This serves to morally polarize the political discourse by granting a seal of approval to some statements and not to others.

One can truly recognize these institutions as part of a repressive discourse environment only when one recognizes this moralism. The various methods by which political discussions are redirected into a negotiation about the truth, which one is now either allowed to acknowledge, or else one is a dissenter, a conspiracy theorist, a denier of something."

Michael Andrick

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Voltaire

"Political correctness has now reached a level in our society that I see as highly questionable. It starts with the deletion of more and more postings in the social media. Postings, mind you, with content that is clearly not punishable or otherwise legally actionable. The mere fact that a certain group might feel offended by a text is enough. More and more companies and corporations are joining this unfortunate trend and issuing internal memos about required language rules or how to deal with certain topics, the disregard of which can lead to serious consequences for employees. Again, these are not criminal or justiciable matters (which, of course, should rightly be stopped), but rather some of the most harmless formulations and matters that are actually covered by the right to freedom of expression. What I find most alarming, however, is the development at our universities. Places where the free exchange of ideas and opinions should actually be part of the basic equipment. Almost every day, professors, doctoral students and other university staff tell me that they would now be risking their careers if they were to publicly question or criticize current developments at universities. Theses and assertions have even become established there in the meantime, some of which contradict a fundamental scientific factual basis. Unfortunately, I do not see the end of the line. I think it will get much worse."

Vince Ebert

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

George Orwell

"In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. [...] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore."

Yuval Noah Harari

"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"

Franklin D. Roosevelt