"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky

"Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Every burned book enlightens the world."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
--Heinrich Heine

"To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."
--Claude Adrien Helvetius, De l'Homme, Vol. I, sec. 4

"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, Essays on Education

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."
--Peter S. Jennison

"Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance."
--Lyndon Baines Johnson

" It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief."
-- Samuel Johnson

" Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. "
-- Harper Lee

" 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

" We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder "censorship," we call it "concern for commercial viability." "
-- David Mamet

"The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for an opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time."
--Joseph Lewis, Voltaire: The Incomparable Infidel, 1929

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
--Clare Booth Luce

" They can't censor the gleam in my eye."
-- Charles Laughton

" If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid. "
-- Herman Melville

" As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. "
-- John Milton

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
--George Bernard Shaw

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
--Mark Twain

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Danielle Hollister
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art8364.asp