Quotes About Book Censorship

#1. Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I'll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won't even write it down.

Murong Xuecun

#2. There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.

John Boorman

#3. 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

#4. Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#5. [T]he German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul ...

Israel Zangwill

#6. No," said Dina. "We don't burn books."
"Who's we?"
"People with an ounce of brain.

G. Willow Wilson

#7. 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

#8. And that is the problem with a society that doesn't read books. The most painful form of censorship does not come from a centralized, repressive government. It is a cast, black cloak of a nation's indifference.

Lourd De Veyra

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

Geraldine Brooks

#10. Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored.

Oliver Markus

#11. History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.

Holbrook Jackson

#12. I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them.

Lois Lowry

#13. Don't join the book burners!

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#14. 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

#15. When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

Judy Blume

#16. Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

David Davis

#17. And that's the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the work of the control freaks for them, out of a desire to avoid them.

G.R. Reader

#18. A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

Erica Jong

#19. One of the greatest threats facing book publishing, and the entire country for that matter, is censorship.

Bennett Cerf

#20. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Pat Conroy

#21. The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.

Evan Osnos

#22. 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

#23. I can't write this book. It's not politically correct yet

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#24. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Max Lerner

#25. The trouble with censorship is that once it starts it is hard to stop. Just about every book contains something that someone objects to.

Studs Terkel

#26. Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don't even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that's wrong.

Judy Blume

#27. 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

#28. People die, but books never die.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#29. A phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.

Robin Morgan

#30. Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Isaac Asimov

#31. Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

John Milton

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

Ray Bradbury

#33. A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Rikki Ducornet

#34. It's red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I've finished this, I shall recommend they ban it.

Tony Hancock

#35. I believe in any kid's ability to read any book and form their own judgments. It's the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.

Sherman Alexie

#36. Censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books
with one hand.

Robin Morgan