Book Banning Quotes

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions.

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.

Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

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'?

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.

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.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

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.

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.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

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.

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

The abuse dies in a day; but the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.

Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.

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.