Joseph Stalin Quotes

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

We don't allow praise or support of terror groups and terror acts.

Sasha, aren’t you a good communist? How can you allow so much ideological freedom? Do something!.

I am not in a position to say whether we can legislate effectively in reference to this matter [Communist propaganda], but I do know that exposure in a democracy of subversive activities is the most effective weapon that we have in our possession.

If thought were left perfectly free from ban of legislative or ecclesiastical censor, the best thoughts would as naturally prevail over the worst as the best seeds of the forest naturally triumph over the worst seeds.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

You have no right to erect your toll gate upon the highways of thought.

The right-wing wants to destroy all the media and replace it with their propaganda.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

This generation is frightened of ideas, or at least it's being suppressed.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

A lot of the people involved in the media are very serious, honest people, and they will tell you, and I think they are right, that they are not being forced to write anything... What they don't tell you, and are maybe unaware of, is that they are allowed to write freely because their beliefs conform to the... standard doctrinal system, and then, yes, they are allowed to write freely and are not coerced.

As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.

In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

The most critical threat to our freedom is a failure to appreciate the power of truth.

there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.

Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.

In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.