October 9, 2004
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…found it!
I found my favorite censorship quote.
How could I have forgotten that it was Robert A. Heinlein who said
it? He is also the author of my all-round favorite quote, the one
about stupidity down at the bottom of my quotes list in my
sidebar. In all his writings, he gave the best lines to old
Lazarus Long.“Secrecy is the keystone of all
tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government or
any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This
you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to
know’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the
motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has
been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free
man, a man whose mind is free.”
Comments (8)
What always gets me is why a man or a woman would allow his or her mind to be hoodwinked in the first place. It IS a great quote. Thanks for sharing.
amen
Well said.
excellent quote.
Yet everyone in power is obsessed with everyone else thinking like them. Take The Church. In the past in the UK they have opposed Science, Genetics, schooling for children, women getting the vote, jazz, rock, books, black people (“devil-men”) and so on. Think where we would be if they had ruled the roost.
Yeah, right on.
You probably know my favorite LL quote–”An armed society is a polite society.”
mine is …you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think!
Censorship is for cowards…those who can’t defend their beliefs with any intelligent argument, so they bully their way into power and try to make people afraid to think.