Ajit Pai Quotes

Television should be regulated like a toaster.

The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.

If you operate a TV or radio station, you have to have a license. It has nothing to do with fundamental freedom. It has to do with protection of the average citizen against abuses.

I never sue journalists. I employ journalists. I employ too many of them. I don't sue journalists.

I think if you open the door to government control of television, then you let in a host of questions about rights.

Isn't it only appropriate that, in return for the free use of the public spectrum, broadcasters provide something substantial, something that wouldn't otherwise be provided by marketplace competition?

I was for many years myself a journalist and it is not appropriate to say a programme should not be broadcast.

'Sex and The City' had very strong gag orders as to what we could say and not say.

Do we really want the FCC to conduct investigations and issue warnings to radio talk show hosts nationwide who simply discuss the important issues of our time? The Constitution says 'freedom of speech,' not 'freedom of government-approved fair speech in rationed amounts.'

The 1st Amendment does not mandate that the press be accurate.

The fact that there aren't more restrictions on the media is disgraceful.

The First Amendment protects the news media and the news media knows how to use it. Donald Trump doesn't understand it, he's never going to understand it.

The last thing reporters and editors want to be told is what to do and how to write. They don't want to be some politically correct, Orwellian, kind of like "you're telling me how to write about...?"

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

I can use my credit card to send money to the Ku Klux Klan, to antiabortion fanatics, or to anti-homosexual bigots, but I can't use it to send money to WikiLeaks. The New York Times published the same documents. Should we tell Visa and MasterCard to stop payments to the Times?

You could do much more in movies than you could on TV, and even movies were heavily censored. But in television, the areas of timorousness were fairly laid out. Race relations. Sex. Politics. There was a whole conglomeration of taboo themes. And even to date, though television has become a much freer medium, it's still far less free, far less creatively untrammeled than are the movies. They're infinitely more adult in that respect.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

The federal government has more power to recall a defective stuffed animal who's little glass eye may fall off than to recall contaminated ground beef that could sicken or even kill hundreds if not thousands of people. The meat-packing industry is so powerful that it's managed to prevent the government from having this basic power of recalling a defective product.

There's no human censorship at kiosks.

The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

When the commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof the pig is obscene.

The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.

If someone tries to put limits on the press, I'll be the first one standing up for the right of press, left and right, to continue saying and being part of the discussion and forwarding the discussion.

You're gonna check my computer records? Is that important? I don't think the government needs to know how I feel about teen Asian sluts in order to fight terrorism.