Censoring Books Quotes

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

Art made tongue-tied by authority.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

Don't join the book burners!

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

There's more than one way to be a girl

There is more than one way to burn a book.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.