Quotes About Expression

Suppression of expression conceals the real problems confronting a society and diverts public attention from the critical issues. It is likely to result in neglect of the grievances which are the actual basis of the unrest, and this prevent their correction.

The right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of crackpot than the stigma of conformity.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.

No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

I think that you've got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

Once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell.

Canst paint a doleful cry?

Every story needs to be told in just the right way.

I continued to stare at the empty seat because my sensation of a vibrant presence there was unrelieved. And in my staring I perceived that the fabric of the seat, the inner webbing of swirling fibers, had composed a pattern in the image of a face—an old woman's face with an expression of avid malignance—floating amidst wild shocks of twisting hair.

Creativity isn't always an index of niceness

But some people seem born to bellyache that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this posture in philosophical or literary works, they may do so without anxiety that their efforts will have an excess of admirers.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices. There was no place in such a scheme for orders, styles, sophistication, taste. ("The Asian Shore")

This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly, I could not be more miserable.

No society could survive—and surely no society could be decent—if everybody in it were able to communicate everything. —Daniel J. Boorstin