Repression of Ideas Quotes

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

My ideas are threatening to the government.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

The government of Israel doesn't like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

I often get attacked in Saudi Arabia, but the critics don't ridicule my ideas. There were about 30 or 40 articles attacking me in the Saudi press. Not a single one debated something I wrote. They just ridiculed me as a person. They see me as a traitor who is writing in the foreign press. But discuss what I am writing? They will not.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.