#censorship

"[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."

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

"All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news."

"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'?"

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

"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."

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."

"All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us."

"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)]"

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

"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."

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."