#censor

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." [Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950] ↗

— Harry S. Truman

#dissent #freedom-of-speech #opposition #politics #repression

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

#books #censorship #freedom #freedom

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent. ↗

— Mark Twain

#fallibility #humor #sin #humor

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. ↗

— John Milton

#censorship #ideas #intellect #life

You can never talk religion on network TV. It makes too many people angry. You can talk about sex. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#comedy #religion #sex #tv #religion

The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors. ↗

— Bruce Coville

#heroes #librarians #teachers #teacher

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#fahrenheit- #technology

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . . ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#censorship #work

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ↗

— Joseph Brodsky

#censorship #illiteracy #reading #read

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers. ↗

— Judy Blume

#censorship #young