A Quote by Tom Smothers
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
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Censorship' is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one's own antagonists.
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.
The problem is, as a company, if you attempt to streamline knowledge or try to limit information you get accused of censorship. So they have to open the gates to any a**hole's opinion. It's like 'oh that opinion is valid'. No, it's not. Not all opinions are valid, you know? It's this idea that every kid gets a trophy. Yeah, but someone won the game!
Sometimes we're tone-deaf in Washington, and we listen only to ourselves. We do not hear the cry of people who want answers, want action, want protection, and have some darn good ideas as to how to provide it if only we would listen.
But the proclamation, as law, either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.
Focus on a few key objectives ... I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light. So I'm really in the business of being the gatekeeper and the transmitter of ideas.
We have this sort of tacit censorship, which is the ratings system, and it's directly tied to box office, so it is censorship. Like, if you make an R-rated movie, you know that only a certain amount of people are going to go see it under any circumstance.
Some people want tolerance to mean now that all ideas are equally valid. That's nonsense. There are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong.
Ideas matter a lot, the underlying ideas that stand behind policies. When you don't have ideas, your policies are flip-flopping all over the place. When you do have ideas, you have more consistency. And when you have the right ideas - then you can get somewhere (reagan had the right ideas).
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?
The idea that we should be open to all ideas is very different from the supposition that all ideas are equally valid.
I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it's not censorship.
When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.
Change masters are - literally - the right people in the right place at the right time. The right people are the ones with the ideas that move beyond the organization's established practice, ideas they can form into visions. The right places are the integrative environments that support innovation, encourage the building of coalitions and teams to support and implement visions. The right times are those moments in the flow of organizational history when it is possible to reconstruct reality on the basis on accumulated innovations to shape a more productive and successful future.
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