Quotes & Sayings About Banned Books

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

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

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in. — Chris Crutcher

My Lesbian history tells me that the vice squad is never our friend even when it is called in by women; that when police rid a neighborhood of 'undesirables,' the undesirables have also included street Lesbians; that I must find another way to fight violence against women without doing violence to my Lesbian self. I must find a way that does not cooperate with the state forces against sexuality, forces that raided my bars, beat up my women, entrapped us in bathrooms, closed our plays, and banned our books. — Joan Nestle

My mom was a big feminist, and when I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to have typical girl toys: she did not let me have dolls. Barbies were banned in our household. She read feminist books to me; my mom was a major feminist. — Leila Janah

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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

'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time. — Michael Ignatieff

I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in. — Lev Grossman

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

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

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

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

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

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

I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually. — Ma Jian

In India books are nearly always banned at the request of people who do not read but whose literary sensibilities are easily offended. — Tavleen Singh

And give me insults, give me
economic discrimination, give me
the darkened parking lot of a
windowless queer bar, give me
fleets of bigots and books banned
in libraries across america, feed the world
with lies about my life and plop a second
helping of oppression on my plate
and thank you for not making me straight. — Michelle Tea

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

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

Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned. — Germaine Greer

And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet. — Russell Brand

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

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

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

Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family.
I remember the pain. — Mildred D. Taylor

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

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

The Local Paper here asked that me books be banned ... THE HIGHEST PRAISE for an Irish writer. — Ken Bruen

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." ~Ray Bradbury — Ray Bradbury

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Being an author of banned books is cool, I've decided. — Lauren Myracle

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. — Elaine Pagels

I think serious readers of books are 5% of the population. If there are good TV shows or a World Cup or anything, that 5% will keep on reading books very seriously, enthusiastically. And if a society banned books, they would go into the forest and remember all the books. So I trust in their existence. I have confidence. — Haruki Murakami

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

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash. — Lauren Myracle

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

[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

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power. — James Howe

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books? — Gao Xingjian

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

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

I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive.
And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

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

In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o'clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words. — George Grosz

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

Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together. — Philippa Gregory

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. — Alfred Whitney Griswold

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading. — Carolyn Mackler

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. — Herman Melville

When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day. — Sarah Vowell

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

Books can make a difference in dispelling prejudice and building community: not with role models and recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives of others. A good story lets you know people as individuals in all their particularity and conflict; and once you see someone as a person - flawed, complex, striving - you've reached beyond stereotype. — Hazel Rochman