#censorship

"Only the nonreader fears books."

"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."

"Libraries should be open to all - except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]"

"Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?"

"To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."

"Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent."

"A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear."

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

"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."

"When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie."

"Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable."

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read."[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]"

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

"You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex."

"I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship."

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

"[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."

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed."

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

"A leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader."