Banned Books Quotes

Alan said he'd known what to expect from de St Jorre from the kick-off, since in his preface this cretin speaks of banned books being burnt in the same way heretics were burnt by religious tyrants. Alan was quick to denounce the cruel inhumanity of liberal fuckwits who wantonly blurred the lines between human life and products of a literary culture that had yet to escape its commodity form. ~ Stewart Home

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have
officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona
have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now. ~ Sherman Alexie

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

Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it. ~ Judy Blume

Censors don't want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty. ~ Judy Blume

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

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. ~ Walt Whitman

If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them."
[Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992] ~ Stephen King

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

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

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

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

Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. ~ Oliver Markus

[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

The school board banned one of Maya Angelou's books, so the librarian had to take down her poster.

I fished it out of the trash.

She must be a great writer if the school board is scared of her. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Every time they ban the book, it becomes national headlines. I sell more books, so it's actually lucrative for me. We call Banned Books Week in my house "Big-Assed Royalties Week. ~ Sherman Alexie

Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned. ~ John Farndon

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

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

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

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me. ~ Judy Blume

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

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

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

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

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous - they contain ideas. ~ Pete Hautman

I myself grew up to be not only a Hero, but also a Writer. When I was an adult, I rewrote A Hero's Guide to Deadly Dragons, and I included not only some descriptions of the various deadly dragon species, and a useful Dragonese Dictionary, but also this story of how the book came to be written in the first place.

This is the book that you are holding in your hands right now.

Perhaps you even borrowed it from a Library?

If so, thank Thor that the sinister figure of the Hairy Scary Librarian is not lurking around a corner, hiding in the shadows, Heart-Slicers at the ready, or that the punishment for your curiosity is not the whirring whine of a Driller Dragon's drill.

You, dear reader, I am sure cannot imagine what it might to be like to live in a world in which books are banned.

For surely such things will never happen in the Future?

Thank Thor that you live in a time and a place where people have the right to live and think and write and read their books in peace, and there are no need for Heroes anymore ...

And spare a thought for those who have not been so lucky. ~ Cressida Cowell

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

...people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It's a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them... ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Or on retiring to Prunesquallors' he might take down one of the Doctor's many books and read, for these days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from. He imagined himself occasions when the conversation of one from who he foresaw advancement might turn to astronomy, metaphysics, history, chemistry, or literature, and he realized that to be able to drop into the argument a lucid and exact thought, an opinion based on what might *appear* to be a life-time study, would instantaneously gain more for him than waiting until the conversation turned upon what lay within his scope of experience. ~ Mervyn Peake

I have two books that were published quite some time ago. I start to read about three sentences. I have to close it. I am so self-conscious. Who did I think I was? ~ Patty Duke

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film. ~ Shane Carruth

Books are not seldom talismans and spells. ~ William Cowper

Bill Clinton has a brand new book coming out in a few months and the Democrats are worried that the Clinton book might upstage the Kerry campaign. I'm thinking, hell, day-old meat loaf could upstage that campaign. ~ David Letterman

Books have become our dearest companions, yielding exquisite delights and inspiring lofty aims. ~ George Henry Lewes

Books are like people: there are too many and most are garbage but we keep producing them because maybe a really amazing one will turn up though it's doubtful as fuck. ~ Brian Alan Ellis

Books, be they physical objects or electronic pulses, are way cool. They are idea houses. So let those who want to read from machines. Those who love the feel, the smell, the gilt edging and the pretty covers and the soft paper, and the kinetic memories will enjoy the physical objects. Either form can be artifact. So long as we're all reading, and gaining joy from it, does it really matter so much? ~ Wendy Welch

Comic books themselves are getting more literate. And there are people who are screenwriters and television writers and novelists who are writing for the comics, for some reason, they love doing it and some of the art work in the comics, I mean it rivals anything you'll see hanging on the walls of museums, they're illustrations more than drawings and all the people are discovering this and they're turning on to it. ~ Stan Lee

I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken. ~ Susan Vaught

Magic came very easy for me when I was a kid. When I was 8 years old I started doing it, and by the time I was 12, I was already published in magic books. ~ David Copperfield

Fine, I'll admit it, I've read all of the books in the trilogy, which have sold more copies than there are people in the world because a lot of girls have hoarded multiple copies of each book and hidden the backup copies under their beds or in their lockers or in hollow trees, in case there's a nuclear holocaust. ~ Paul Rudnick

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time. ~ Lalla Ward

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. ~ Jonathan Ames

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper. ~ David Quammen

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books. ~ Rainn Wilson

I have faced bullying before. Not in high school. Not in any school but when I published my now bestselling book series as an indie author back in 2010 through 2012 and became a target for indie publishing, especially in YA because I stood by Amazon self-publishing versus the traditional publishers. How I dealt with it? I kept doing what I love - writing and publishing, and giving my readers what they love. Indie publishing took off soon afterwards and now it is a valid and more desirable way to publish books. So the lesson learned is...don't let bullies stop you from doing what you love and from keeping you from giving your readers the books they love to read from you." - Kailin Gow in a National Radio Interview. ~ Kailin Gow

The trouble with bookshops is that they are as bad as pubs. You start at one and then you drift to another, and before you know where you are you are on a gigantic book-binge. My brief case was full to bursting and I had bundles of books under both arms. I was bowed down by the weight of them. ~ R.T. Campbell

A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative ... . That is why constant learning softens your brain ... . Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare's remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that s not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfor ~ Hermann Hesse

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. ~ Werner Herzog

Look, history is interesting. I read three books on George Washington last year. And my opinion is that if they're still analyzing the first president, the 43rd president ought to be doing what he thinks is right. And eventually, historians will come and realize whether ... the decisions I made made sense. ~ George W. Bush

I was, without a sliver of a doubt, a no-good, lazy slacker of a child, and after I discovered literature, I was totally and utterly a no-good, lazy slacker of a child who read books. A lot of books, good and bad, but my favourite - the books I read and reread in my teens - were by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. ~ Ben Peek

Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated - Dad's told me - there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And - "
"All right, I've got the point," said Harry. ~ J.K. Rowling

I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny ... I forgive him everything. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Read books, discover the blues and don't Tweet. ~ Bernie Taupin

I'm a swot," said James. "I read books all the time and I do not know how to talk to people. If I was a girl living in olden times, people would call me a bluestocking. I wish I could talk to people like you do. I wish I could smile at people and make them like me. I wish I could tell a story and have everybody listen, and have people follow me around wherever I went. Well, no, I don't, because I am slightly terrified by people, but I wish I could do all that you can do, just the same. ~ Cassandra Clare

For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. ~ Bill Gates

Golden Heart finalist in the prestigious RWA writing contest. Finalist in the International Digital Awards Semi-finalist in the Best Indie Books of 2012. A featured ~ E. Ayers

He can't take his eyes off the stars, but I can't take mine off his face. ~ Amie Kaufman

And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers. ~ Walter Scott

…only then did I wake out of the book. ~ John McGahern

Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom's advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable education system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was mad invisible by research lingo: "MSM," otherwise known as "men who have sex with men'), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)... ~ Kiese Laymon

The teachers liked me. In grade school, they make you copy pictures from books. I think the first one was Robert Louis Stevenson. ~ Andy Warhol

As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey. ~ Stephen Gaghan

Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk – his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world – as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape….He recalled his and Tracy's parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior through there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had ~ Michael Chabon

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done. ~ Colson Whitehead

We cannot learn men from books. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Of course you should study whatever you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavour, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d'you think books are the first things that the fascists burn? ~ David Nicholls

It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people. ~ Heinrich Heine

Book buying studies have proven a reader has to hear about your book multiple times before they reach into their wallet and purchase a book. The number of exposures to your book is somewhere between six and twelve times before you collect a sale. A key part of your platform building process as an author is to give readers multiple exposures to your book and the availability. ~ W. Terry Whalin

I've spoken in every state in the union, meeting and hugging the people who later bought my books. I spoke to anybody who wanted to hear me, including 1,000 nuns who could pay me only with homemade bread. ~ Leo Buscaglia

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose. ~ Matthew Specktor

I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination. ~ Rachel Nichols