You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

but the trouble with witnessing miracles is that you come to expect more of them

This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked

Challenge involves offence. Stop offending, and the world stands still

Those who fought on the side of liberty did not worry about offending the religious or challenging cultures

Censorship’s main role is to restrict the scope for action. If religious terror ensures that every mainstream broadcaster is frightened of lampooning Islam’s founding myths, or if the citizens of a dictatorship know that they will be arrested if they challenge their leaders’ abuses of power, then censors are exercising effective control by punishing those who challenge them and bullying their contemporaries into silence

But manipulation becomes censorship only on those occasions when the law punishes those who expose the spin