Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

Acker’s warning lands because it refuses the comforting villain of the jackboot censor. “More dangerous” doesn’t mean louder or more brutal; it means harder to locate, harder to fight, and easier to deny. By stressing what “can’t be seen fully,” she shifts censorship from a clear act (a ban, a raid, a redacted page) to a social weather system: the glances, reputational threats, and preemptive self-editing that make people police themselves before any authority has to.

The phrase “internal censorship” is doing double duty. It’s psychological (the voice in your head calculating consequences) and communal (a culture of mutual surveillance where everyone becomes a minor bureaucrat of acceptable speech). “We censor each other” is the dagger. Acker isn’t simply accusing “the state” or “the media”; she’s implicating peers, subcultures, even friends. That’s a particularly thorny charge coming from someone associated with transgressive art and activism: spaces built around liberation can quietly reproduce their own orthodoxy, enforcing purity tests, norms of tone, or ideological compliance. The mechanism isn’t necessarily law; it’s belonging.

Context matters: Acker came of age amid obscenity battles, feminist infighting over pornography, and the late-20th-century culture wars, when “free expression” could be wielded both to protect the marginalized and to launder cruelty. Her line anticipates today’s discourse economy, where punishment is often decentralized: outrage circulates faster than institutions, and deterrence arrives as social cost. The genius of her framing is its discomforting intimacy. The censor isn’t “out there.” It’s us, performing virtue, managing risk, and calling it community.