Roy M. Goodman Quotes

Nowadays, politically, everybody is promising everything. That's the only way you can get elected.

This cleaning up of our culture must extend to nearly all domains. Theater, art, literature, movies, the press, posters, and window displays must be cleaned of the symptoms of a rotting world and put into the service of a moral idea of state and culture.

There is no political downside to smut bashing.

Athens put to death the people who made it their business to trade on the passions of men. A common whipping post might be very wholesome for New York today.

If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you make it an issue and run against me.

… government policy should favor married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators, Working women … are detrimental to the family man's basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter

In Bangladesh, if you put a kiss in a film, it's political.

Every time you work on a political campaign, half the people hate you. That's how it is.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression.

The only hope that America has is that Godly men and women of character will stand together as one mighty army and declare to the immoral, impure, obscene, and foul: “Your days of unlimited access to the minds of our children in Kansas are over.” The army of God has been silent too long and we are taking this state back.

Our press has too much freedom …. Democracy is a very lovely thing for a developed people.

In deciding the ratings of the films, no consideration is given to artistic, technical or dramatic values. Only moral content is weighed.

I will not have the Federal Theater used politically.

A book is only dangerous when it unmasks something that many people want hidden or it brings to the forefront an issue that many want marginalized.

Pornography is a malady to be diagnosed and an occasion for judgment. It's something one is for or against. And taking sides about pornography is hardly like being against aleatoric music or Pop Art, but quite a bit like being for or against legalized abortion or federal aid to parochial schools.

When the arts become a political football, they lose.

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage — the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.

The standard of what offends 'the common conscience of the community' conflicts ... with the command of the First Amendment. ... Certainly that standard would not be an acceptable one if religion, economics, politics or philosophy were involved. How does it become a constitutional standard when literature treating with sex is concerned? Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to 'sexual impurity' or has a tendency to 'excite lustful thoughts.' This is community censorship in one of its worst forms...

State intervention in the literary realm went far beyond the blue-penciling of texts. It extended to the shaping of literature itself as a force at work throughout the social order. If states wielded such power in the age of print, what will restrain them from abusing it in the age of the Internet?

In politics, familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It breeds votes.

By supporting Reagan, evangelicals were not supporting womanizing or divorce, but they were endorsing Reagan's policies.

Free speech is one of the most important things to me, but I think it gets confusing when it comes to offense. Because for one, just because you have the right to say anything, it doesn't mean you have to.

I turn down a lot of movies because sometimes they glamorize violence or the darker side of sex or criminality.