Time & Perspective Quote by Milos Forman

Forman’s line has the blunt realism of someone who watched a state try to edit human nature with a bureaucrat’s pen. A Czech director who lived under Communist censorship and then made films in the West about institutions crushing the individual (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus), he’s warning against a comforting fantasy: that suppressing expression suppresses the impulse behind it. Censorship doesn’t delete “bad”; it relocates it.

The intent is almost prosecutorial. Forman isn’t defending cruelty or propaganda as “free speech” talking points; he’s attacking the moral sleight of hand that lets authorities claim virtue while merely hiding the evidence. The subtext is psychological and political at once: when you force ugliness underground, you don’t neutralize it, you deprive society of the chance to see it, argue with it, satirize it, or build antibodies against it. You also hand “the censor” a new instrument of power, because the line between protecting the public and protecting the regime is always smudged on purpose.

Notice how the sentence pivots on “people must not think.” He’s not addressing censors; he’s addressing the audience that wants the comfort of clean surfaces. That’s the sharpest part: censorship is a collaboration. It offers a bargain - fewer offensive words now, at the price of less truth later. Forman, shaped by a culture where banned art became a kind of underground news, understands that what’s repressed doesn’t vanish; it waits, mutates, and returns, often uglier for having been denied daylight.