Film Censorship Quotes & Sayings

One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else; the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed ... — Edgar Dale

We must, nevertheless, always work at it, because not to advance in the spiritual life is to go back. — Brother Lawrence

The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology. — Akira Kurosawa

I always loved music, and I always wanted to make a film about it, but I could never do it because of the censorship that was around. — Bahman Ghobadi

We have a word, censorship, which describes the suppression or alteration of the artist's work by governmental edict intended to prohibit the expression of certain ideas. We have no word for what happened to the writer who refused to splice gratuitous sex scenes into her work. We have no word for the mandatory inclusion of the predictable, invariant Sweaty Sex Scene in nearly every contemporary film intended for adults, nor for the daily, unavoidable overload of sexual images used to sell other kinds of products. It is a sort of reverse censorship, imposed by market analysts who don't believe anything will sell unless coated by sex. Liberation it is not. — D.A. Clarke

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. — John Boorman

If life is becoming a race, could it be time to slow down?el — Evinda Lepins

There shouldn't be any censorship on making a film. — Anurag Kashyap

A beautiful person is a person who is capable of being the best version of himself/herself, inside and out as often as possible. — Rita Zahara

The reign of terror to which France submitted has been more justly termed "the reign of cowardice." One knows not which most to execrate,
the nation that could submit to suffer such atrocities, or that low and bloodthirsty demagogue that could inflict them. France, in succumbing to such a wretch as Robespierre, exhibited, not her patience, but her pusillanimity. — Charles Caleb Colton

In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand. — G. Willow Wilson

I'm very much interested in music specifically and wanted to make a film about it, but not in an atmosphere of censorship. — Bahman Ghobadi

You know that doctrine matters, but it's difficult to know how much time to devote to it among the demands of everyday life. — Anonymous

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life. — Rebecca West

We live in far too permissive a society. Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are so badly lit! — Woody Allen

The dictatorship is embodied in the formal structure of the film (Days of 36). Imposed silence was one of the conditions under which we worked. The film is... made in such a way that the spectator realizes that censorship is involved. — Theodoros Angelopoulos

I don't do well with snakes and I can't dance. — Robin Williams

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop, ... Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public. — John McCain

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art. — Azar Nafisi

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change. — Aung San Suu Kyi