Creativity Quote by Max Cannon

Max Cannon’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: it captures the anxious logic of censorship in one blunt, almost unfinished sentence. The phrasing matters. “These censorship people” isn’t a formal opponent; it’s a type, a recurring character in cultural fights - the watchdog who shows up whenever art makes someone uncomfortable. And “think something is going to promote behavior” exposes the core assumption censors rarely defend outright: that audiences are basically programmable, that depiction equals endorsement, that a song, comic, game, or image doesn’t just represent the world but recruits for it.

As an artist, Cannon is pushing back on the moral panic reflex that treats culture as contagion. The vagueness of “something” is doing work here; it mimics how censorship arguments often operate, sliding from specific concerns into a fog of insinuation. What, exactly, is the dangerous “something”? Sex, drugs, violence, queerness, dissent - the object changes, the mechanism stays. The target is less a particular work than the idea that art can be messy without being a marching order.

The subtext is a critique of power wearing the costume of protection. Censorship presents itself as safeguarding the vulnerable, but it also polices which stories get legitimacy and which communities get framed as threats. Cannon’s line isn’t a lofty defense of “free expression” as a slogan; it’s a jab at the fearful simplification underneath: the belief that people don’t interpret art, they obey it.