A Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.

J. M. Coetzee

Quote Topics

Attracts Been Censor Censorship Game Intelligent Messages Minds Occupation Often Past Proper Slipping Sterile Subtle Task Ultimately Writers

Quote Author

J. M. Coetzee
South African - Novelist
Born: February 9, 1940

Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion.

Susan Jacoby

Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).

Wilfrid Sheed

The way we censor in America is the dollar. That's who censors.

Maz Jobrani

The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

Herbert Marcuse

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Doris Lessing

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I am opposed to censorship. Censors are pretty sure fools. I have no confidence in the suppression of everyday facts.

James Harvey Robinson

We are not naturally intelligent, or happy. In fact, every day it is harder to remain intelligent. It seems often that people get intelligent through pain, but you can't be sure because nobody really can say, "I've been suffering".

Francesco Clemente

Once you get used to censorship, sometimes you self-censor.

Lucien Bourjeily

Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh.

D. H. Lawrence

The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.

Maya Deren

I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.

Patti Smith

Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves.

Emma Stone

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

Albert Camus

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.