A Quote by John Osborne

Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice. — © John Osborne
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.
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.
Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.
Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.
The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.
Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.
After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God.
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
Rick Perry told reporters this week that he has a permit to carry a concealed handgun. He also has a concealed vocabulary, concealed knowledge of the issues, concealed tolerance.
There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.
The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille
Self-censorship happens not only in China, or Iran or ex-Soviet places. It can happen anywhere. If an artist penetrates a certain taboo or a certain power through their work, he or she will face this problem. I'm always saying that commercial censorship is our foremost censorship globally today. Why do we still pretend we are free?
Maybe this is blasphemy to say, but I feel like music is not meant to be something that earning your keep depends on because it cheapens it and it will force you into making decisions in the interest of earning your keep, as opposed to the interest of the thing itself.
Remember all of the 'me too' social networks built just to have a social feature Facebook and MySpace didn't have? I built one for political discussion called Essembly. It enabled unique and potentially transformative social interactions, but only 20,000 people ever used it.
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