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

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

"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

"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

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

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

"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

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
— Salman Rushdie

"[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

"If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed."
— Benjamin Franklin

"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

"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

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."
— Ray Bradbury

"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

"Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence."
— Salman Rushdie

"Give me a break." (Lennon's comment to fundamentalist Christian outrage at his comment that the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus)"
— John Lennon

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

"If you can't say Fuck, you can't say, Fuck the government."
— Lenny Bruce

"There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it."
— Frank Zappa

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

"All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us."
— Katherine Paterson

"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)

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?"
— Decimus Junius Juvenalis

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

"To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it."
— Michel de Montaigne (Montaigne: Essays)

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

"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
— John Morley

"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

"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present."
— Golda Meir

"I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?"
— Frank Zappa

"A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
— Laurence Peter

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."
— Walt Whitman

"Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently."
— Rosa Luxemburg

"Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones."
— Ray Bradbury

"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

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

"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)

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
— Eugene O'Neill

"Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so."
— Robert H. Jackson

"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

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail."
— Laurence Sterne

"Censorship is advertising paid by the government."
— Federico Fellini