Censorship' is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one's own antagonists.
Nothing harmful to the nation, the revolution, or the party must be thought of or created.
There's no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, 'The government's corrupt,' and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.
The Communist regime didn't consider this to be a shining moment in history and assigned no heroism to it. They classified it as merely an accident.
I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it's not censorship.
Two increasing themes which appear to dominate our listening, reading and watching lives are propaganda and 'national security', or manufactured war.
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.
The majority of Americans get their news and information about what is going on with their government from entities that are licensed by and subject to punishment at the hands of that very government.
Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.
The downfall of democratic institutions in Russia doesn't add to the self-confidence of either [Vladimir] Putin or his friends, as the loss of power could lead to repercussions in Russian society.
Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.
I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.
You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.
A group of Cuban Americans denounced the Castro government as a fascist regime that monitors and scrutinized its citizens' everyday existence. And then they excused themselves to go watch Big Brother.
Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents but to protect the Government of the day against the people.
There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.
The Chinese government learnt how to manage the Internet from Western developed countries; we have not learnt enough yet.
North Korea is probably the only country in the world deliberately kept out of the Internet.
When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques.
The existing documentary makers still believe that it is impossible to produce drama material in this State, otherwise they would be doing it, they say.
No more fatuous chimera ever infected the brain of man than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute.
