Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Steele Commager

Censorship sells itself as a public service: a firm hand on the cultural tiller, protecting people from corrosive ideas and cheap manipulation. Commager flips that promise by arguing that censorship is less a shield than a slow lobotomy. You can suppress a book, a film, a curriculum; you cannot suppress the skills a free society needs to sort good arguments from bad ones. Those skills only develop through exposure, disagreement, and the occasional stumble.

The line “defeats its own purpose” is doing more than calling censorship ineffective. It’s accusing censors of a category error: they confuse discretion with obedience. Real discretion is internal competence - the ability to weigh competing claims, detect propaganda, tolerate ambiguity. Censorship replaces that with external management, training citizens to wait for permission rather than build judgment. The subtext is almost parental: a state that insists it must decide what you can handle ensures you never learn to handle much.

As a mid-century American historian, Commager is writing in the shadow of moral panics that treated ideas as contagions - from wartime information control to Cold War loyalty tests and book-banning crusades. His warning isn’t that censored people will secretly become freer; it’s that they’ll become easier to govern. The end state is a society of adults habituated to being managed, calling it “protection,” and mistaking the absence of discomfort for the presence of wisdom.