Ler a aprender II

...Sobre a censura, para Santana Lopes, Morais Sarmento e Gomes da Silva, com carinho.


"In France, an institution as arbitrary as censorship would be at once ineffective and intolerable. In the present conditions of society, morals are formed by subtle, fluctuating, elusive nuances, which would be distorted in a thousand ways if one attempted to define them more precisely. Public opinion alone can reach them; public opinion alone can judge them, because it is of the same nature. It would rebel against any positive authority which wanted to give it greater precision. If a government of a modern people wanted, like the censors in Rome, to censure a citizen arbitrarily, the entire nation would protest against this arrest by refusing to retify the decisions of the authority".


Benjamin Constant, 1819,
in "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns".