6 Quotes Tagged: banned-books

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

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.

"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]

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.

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.

[Censors] rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.