Giving Offense Quotes

“The most law-abiding countries are not those with the highest prison populations but those with the lowest offender rates. The law, including the law of censorship, has a dream. In this dream, the daily round of identifying and punishing malefactors will wither away; the law and its constraints will be so deeply engraved on the citizenry that individuals will police themselves. Censorship looks forward to the day when writers will censor themselves and the censor himself can retire. It is for this reason that the physical expulsion of the censor, vomited forth as a demon is, has a certain symbolic value for the writer of Romantic geneology: it stands for a rejection of the dream of reason, the dream of a society of laws founded on reason and obeyed because reasonable.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship