Kenza Fourati Quotes

The Iranian government advocates free speech... but there's no freedom after you've spoken

A lot of times, we censor ourselves before the censor even gets there.

There is no functional difference between censorship and the threat of censorship.

Freedom of speech means nothing to a people who are too weak in their convictions to speak out against the evil that is eating at the heart of the nation like a cancer.

I think the most destructive thing is fear: when people don't want to say what they think.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth - then all Americans are in peril.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

Madame... I have come from a country where one can be hanged for what one says.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

Censors, the whole idea of it, is so childish. You feel like you're talking to hall monitors in school again.

I know things, but I shut my mouth. They don't want me to speak, so I don't speak.

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

People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that prove it.

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

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

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.

I sort of have to self-censor sometimes.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

We're led to believe everybody opposes it and disagrees with political correctness, but yet everybody's scared to death of it. So who is it? Well, it's the power structure wherever you happen to be.