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Back when people couldn't read, other people would take newspapers and turn them into theater so that people would know what was going on in the world. That is a powerful thing.

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.

Most people learn all about the Second World War in school, or else, they see so many films put out by Hollywood, that it's easy to think we know exactly what happened.

I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.

Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn't bother censoring it.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.