Press Suppression Quotes

If this newspaper pestilence shall continue for fifty years more, the intelligence of our people will be destroyed.... Hold fast and zealously, therefore, to the slogan I now ask you to make your own: hatred and contempt, death and destruction, of the press of today.

An ordinance that permits a mayor to say yes to a friendly [news]paper and no to a critical paper is an ordinance that has to fall.

Bhutto's regime is remembered for having one of the worst human rights records in Pakistan's history, and her government did not allow the media freedoms she criticizes Musharraf for crushing.

For thirty years the press has ceased to exist in Turkey. There are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no longer have any potency. If I dare, I would call them gelded newspapers or rather, to keep the local color, eunuchs.

There is no part of the means placed in the hands of the Executive which might be used with greater effect for unhallowed purposes than the control of the public press.

Instead of providing a model for democracy, Turkey's leader represents a throwback: an elected autocrat, tolerated by the West for maintaining a certain stability within and without, overseeing a procedural democracy with a pliant press and a dominent political party that serves only his wishes.

I mean, to call the press the enemy is dangerous and just remarkably bizarre.

The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed.

The violation of press freedoms has been egregious under this administration, even as the press fetes President Obama as an honest and effective commander-in-chief.

As unbalanced parties of every description can never tolerate a free inquiry of any kind, when employed against themselves, the license, and even the most temperate freedom of the press, soon excite resentment and revenge.

If I want to ban any newspaper, I will, with good reason.