Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what., The Guardian, 5 June 2005]

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

Censorship has been my best press agent my whole life.

I hate to think of this sort of book getting into the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.

If they didn't show it on the screen, most people would never know about oral sex.

We live in far too permissive a society. Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are so badly lit!

Censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration.

We'll open in Boston and stay there two weeks. Maybe they'll make us cut out some of the dirty stuff, but we can put it back in for New York.

Men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will.

Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.

Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loudspeakers.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

As we see censorship it is a stupid giant traffic policeman answering Yes to Am I my brother's copper? He guards a one-way street and his semaphore has four signs, all marked stop.

Let us be clear: censorship is cowardice. ... It masks corruption. It is a school of torture: it teaches, and accustoms one to the use of force against an idea, to submit thought to an alien other. But worst still, censorship destroys criticism, which is the essential ingredient of culture.