"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! - of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998)
"You can cage the singer but not the song."
Harry Belafonte (1927- )
This last is perhaps particularly appropriate to the case of Zhao Ziyang, the leading 'reformer' who was purged as General Secretary of the CCP as a result of the TAM protests and spent the next 16 years - until his death - under house arrest. His memoir, Prisoner of the State, secretly recorded on a series of tapes in the early 2000s and smuggled out to the West, is finally about to be published.
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