Top 58 Quotes About Burning Books
#1. I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
Terence McKenna
#2. Greed is empowered by knowledge, but we shouldn't be burning books or reject such knowledge, as what happened during the Inquisition and World War 2. We should instead share it and learn it.
Daniel Marques
#4. You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.
Cornelia Funke
#5. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#6. When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.
Ray Bradbury
#7. Burning books is not as horrible as burning people, because books, contrary to men, are not unique and ideas are fireproof!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#8. Nothing opens up the mind and the heart like books do, and so they have the power to change the whole world. That's why the are burning books, Ava. To stop us thinking, and feeling, and imagining ...
Kate Forsyth
#9. Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.
Heinrich Heine
#10. There are far more a worst crimes than burning books ... Not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#11. The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John Updike
#12. I don't believe in burning holy books, but I am organizing a protest. I'll be burning all my Dennis Miller VHS cassettes as a special protest. I don't want to hear the introduction 'you may have seen our next comedian on the Hannity show'.
Andy Kindler
#13. The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren't thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in.
Jonathan Galassi
#14. I'm sure you understand my meanin'. After all, you're one of us. Your daddy was born here and your mamma was buried here. You belong here. Not everyone does. I stared back at her. She was in her van before I could say another word. This time, Mrs. Lincoln was after more than burning a few books.
Kami Garcia
#15. It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people.
Heinrich Heine
#16. The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
Joseph Lewis
#17. Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
Geraldine Brooks
#19. By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him.
Desiderius Erasmus
#20. Books woke me up. Books are my favorite man-made objects. I fetishize their design, smell, feel. And that they can contain such burning, complex communications is a miracle to me.
Ken Baumann
#21. 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
#22. I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.
Amy Plum
#23. What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
Sigmund Freud
#24. Like a phoenix bursting into flame and a rain of sparks before being reborn in its own ashes, it had taken burning up in my own misery for me to realize I didn't need other people to believe in me before I could do something. I had to believe in myself.
Jodi Meadows
#25. The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books.
Neil Gaiman
#26. Tearing your clothes, burning your books and torturing yourself only prove that you are nothing but a wild creature.
M.F. Moonzajer
#27. There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.
Ray Bradbury
#28. I'm sure the only act that sells more books than a good banning is a good burning.
Pansy Schneider-Horst
#29. The burning soul, the burden'd mind,
In books alone companions find.
Sarah Josepha Hale
#30. 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
#31. Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people
Heinrich Heine
#33. Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.
Ray Bradbury
#34. I'm all for selling books, but when guys are burning my house down, that's where I draw the line.
Robert Kirkman
#35. There must be something in books, something we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.
Ray Bradbury
#36. What America did in Vietnam and the Congo - we feel. And as a result come these demonstrations. I am not defending the act of burning USIS books. We deplore it. But we can understand the motives of the students.
Sukarno
#37. You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand.
Richard De Bury
#38. What a burning shame it is that many of the pieces on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, contained in different school books, have been lost sight of, or been subject to the pruning knife of the slaveholding expurgatorial system!
Robert Purvis
#39. My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.
Galen Rowell
#40. We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.
Samantha Harvey
#41. Books can be dangerous. You never know when they're going to blow up, and what they'll take out when they do. Why do you think dictators are so fond of burning them? One idea can lead to another, and then before you know it, people are going crazy having thoughts and opinions and stuff.
Amanda Weaver
#43. My men are my references. They're waiting outside for the books. They're dangerous."
"Men like that always are.
Ray Bradbury
#44. In 1891 the Brazilian Minister of Finance decreed the abolition of history; he ordered the destruction of every document which dealt in any way with slavery or the slave trade; a nation-wide burning of the books.
Manu Herbstein
#45. Books can be burned," croaked Black.
"They have a way of rising from the ashes," said Andreus.
James Thurber
#46. 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
#47. No," said Dina. "We don't burn books."
"Who's we?"
"People with an ounce of brain.
G. Willow Wilson
#48. I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.
Margot Asquith
#49. Burning the napkin with that part of his story on it is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Like the books out at the Restoration site, like Grandfather's poem, Ky's story, bit by bit, is turning into ash and nothing.
Ally Condie
#50. I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.
Sarah J. Maas
#51. The Christian feels that the tooth of time gnaws all books but the Bible ... 19 centuries of experience have tested it. It has passed through critical fires no other volume has suffered and its spiritual truth has endured the flames and come out without so much as the smell of burning.
W. Sangster
#52. Sit in a room and read
and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
Joseph Campbell
#53. During the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica in the 16th century, the Catholic Church's Friar Diego de Landa supervised the burning of hundreds of Maya codices - fig-bark books rich in mythological and astronomical information. Only four Maya codices are known to have survived.
David Roberts
#55. Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
Heinrich Heine
#56. Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.
John Dingell
#57. 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
#58. I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.
Tom Peters
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