#censorship

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book..."

"Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom."

"Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present."

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

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

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."

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

"A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."

"Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves."

"Only the nonreader fears books."

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

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

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

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

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."

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

"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)]"

"[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."