Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam’s vibrant capital Hanoi, this article asks why attempts to use moralising public iconography as talking points with research collaborators can so often have a silencing effect on otherwise voluble interlocutors. It is proposed that these are moments of agentive silence, where the muting of a vocal self can be an act of moral will, not the crushing of agency and voice. It is therefore suggested that there can be more to a silent self than the effect of a censor’s power to control or extinguish speech, especially in contexts where state propaganda can work both visually and textually to repress as well as authorise a citizen’s expressive voice.