Alycia's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 158)

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
— Kurt Vonnegut

tags: censorship, education, free-speech
82 people liked it

"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

tags: books, censorship, education, reading
48 people liked it

"To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."
— Claude Adrien Helvetius

tags: books, censorship, reading
11 people liked it

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book..."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

tags: books, censorship, freedom, libraries, reading, thought
132 people liked it

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

tags: censorship
19 people liked it

"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
— Mortimer J. Adler

21 people liked it

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

tags: books, censorship, reading
196 people liked it

"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."
— George Bernard Shaw (Mrs. Warren's Profession)

tags: censorship, free, progress, speech
16 people liked it

"Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors."
— Joseph Addison

5 people liked it

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

tags: culture, reading
1,285 people liked it

"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
— Winston S. Churchill

tags: fear, government, liberty
10 people liked it

"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."
— Henry Steele Commager

tags: censorship
6 people liked it

"If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas."
— Graceanne A. Decandido

tags: ideas, liberty, librarian
9 people liked it

"The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be....Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."
— Granville Hicks

tags: censorship
4 people liked it

"Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice."
— Holbrook Jackson

tags: censorship
6 people liked it

"Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?"
— Joseph Henry Jackson

tags: books, censorship, reading
10 people liked it

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: authors
206 people liked it

"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

341 people liked it

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.
"
— Elizabeth Hardwick

6 people liked it

"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature
have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read,
we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
"
— S.I. Hayakawa

8 people liked it

"I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life."
— Scott Corbett

22 people liked it

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."
— Robertson Davies

tags: architecture, books, reading
113 people liked it

"It is not enough to simply teach children to read;
we have to give them something worth reading.
Something that will stretch their imaginations-
something that will help them make sense of their own lives
and encourage them to reach out toward people
whose lives are quite different from their own."
— Katherine Paterson

23 people liked it

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

96 people liked it

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.
"
— James McCosh

5 people liked it

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: books, intelligence
82 people liked it

"Reading makes immigrants of us all.
It takes us away from home, but more important,
it finds homes for us everywhere."
— Hazel Rochman

11 people liked it

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
— Henry Ward Beecher

tags: books, humor
1,211 people liked it

"Books are not made for furniture,
but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."
— Henry Ward Beecher

tags: reading
65 people liked it

"There is no Frigate like a book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry..."
— Emily Dickinson

tags: books, reading
58 people liked it

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."
— Walt Disney Company

tags: books
486 people liked it

"He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend,
a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter.
By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently
divert and pleasantly entertain himself,
as in all weathers, as in all fortunes."
— Isaac Barrow

5 people liked it

"The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity."
— Thomas Carlyle

8 people liked it

""What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.""
— Thomas Carlyle

11 people liked it

"A good book is the purest essence of a human soul."
"
— Thomas Carlyle

6 people liked it

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

tags: books
1,328 people liked it

"It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. "
— Agatha Christie

16 people liked it

"There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. (1952)
"
— Mary Ellen Chase

2 people liked it

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: books, inspirational, reading, tea
1,653 people liked it

"One can never have enough socks," said Dumbledore. "Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

tags: books, christmas, socks
146 people liked it

"I guess there are never enough books."
— John Steinbeck

tags: books
64 people liked it

"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."
— Harry S. Truman

tags: censorship, politics
53 people liked it

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: frost, glitter, gold, lost, poetry, roots, strength, strong, wander, wither
6,107 people liked it

"You know, Minister, I disagree with Dumbledore on many counts...but you cannot deny he's got style..."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

150 people liked it

"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
— Judy Blume

tags: books, censor, communication, freedom, philosophy
246 people liked it

"[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

tags: books, censorship
74 people liked it

"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!"
— John Waters

tags: books, fuck, profanity, reading
338 people liked it

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

tags: books, reading
2,044 people liked it

"A good library will never be too neat or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

tags: libraries, reading
434 people liked it

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

tags: books, humor, reading
303 people liked it

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

Alycia's profile »

all quotes
add a quote

Alycia's quotes

tags from Alycia's quotes