Banned Books
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”
― Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“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...”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”
― George Orwell, 1984
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”
― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver
“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame." - Oscar Wilde
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“What I tell kids is, Don't get mad, get even. Don't spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.”
― Stephen King
“Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.”
― Mark Twain
“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”
― David Leavitt
“Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.”
― Lev Grossman
“There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.”
― Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“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.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt
“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." — Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
If a public school were to remove every book because it contains one word deemed objectionable to some parent, then there would be no books at all in our public libraries.― Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition,