#censorship

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Only the nonreader fears books."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated 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."

"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..."

"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."

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