Top 45 Quotes About Banned Books
#1. Being an author of banned books is cool, I've decided.
Lauren Myracle
#2. 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
#3. I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.
Kathryn Stockett
#4. 'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.
Michael Ignatieff
#5. The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#6. For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)
Margaret Bald
#7. The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.
Carolyn Mackler
#9. 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.
Alberto Manguel
#10. If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society.
Clyde Brion Davis
#11. Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas.
Pete Hautman
#12. I do not believe that any book should be denied to the man who possesses the wisdom to understand it, Bruno, but that does not mean I am confused about where truth lies.
S.J. Parris
#13. I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#14. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
#15. 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.
James Howe
#16. Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
#17. Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together.
Philippa Gregory
#18. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
Herman Melville
#19. Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.
Judy Blume
#20. In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.
Judy Blume
#21. And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.
Russell Brand
#23. What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.
Lauren Myracle
#24. When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.
Craig Nelson
#25. In India books are nearly always banned at the request of people who do not read but whose literary sensibilities are easily offended.
Tavleen Singh
#26. 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.
Stephen Chbosky
#27. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#28. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut
#29. I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually.
Ma Jian
#30. [Censors] rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.
John Milton
#31. Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Ann Patchett
#32. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.
D.H. Lawrence
#33. A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#34. Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It's harsh and sometimes gritty, but it's real. Why should we tip toe around that?
Shandy L. Kurth
#35. 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.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#36. Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored.
Oliver Markus
#37. The Local Paper here asked that me books be banned ... THE HIGHEST PRAISE for an Irish writer.
Ken Bruen
#38. My mom was a big feminist, and when I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to have typical girl toys: she did not let me have dolls. Barbies were banned in our household. She read feminist books to me; my mom was a major feminist.
Leila Janah
#39. The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.
Henry Steele Commager
#40. Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.
Judy Blume
#41. The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Anais Nin
#42. Books were despised by the Viking Tribes, as they were seen as a horrible civilizing influence and a threat to the barbarian culture.
Cressida Cowell
#43. 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'?
Joseph Henry Jackson
#44. Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.
Germaine Greer
#45. The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." ~Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
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