Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Inspirational Intellectual Freedom Women Writing

A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.

~ Ellen Hopkins

Ellen Hopkins Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

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

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

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.

~ Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin Banned Books Censorship Evil Fear Freedom Hypocrisy Intellectual Freedom Literature Perversion Puritanism Sterility

Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.

~ Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende Books Freadom Intellectual Freedom Reading

Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

~ Terence Mckenna

Terence Mckenna Environment Freedom Intellectual Freedom Mind Self Determination

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

James Howe Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Bullying Censorship Fear Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom Power

And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.

~ Arkady Strugatsky

Arkady Strugatsky Censorship Determinism Historical Determinism Intellectual Freedom Knowledge Society

Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse

~ Ignassen Mather

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If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom.Now let me tell you another thing. If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia. Most of our social and domestic problems would have been solved, and equally as important, our understanding and relations with the other peoples of the world would have, by now, brought about universal peace.Man would have a better understanding of his motives and actions, and would have learned to curb his primitive instincts for revenge and retaliation. He would, by now, know that wars of hate, aggression, and aggrandizement are only productive of more hate and more human suffering.The enlightened and completely emancipated man from the fears of a God and the dogma of hate and revenge would make him a brother to his fellow man.He would devote his energies to discoveries and inventions, which theology previously condemned as a defiance of God, but which have proved so beneficial to him. He would no longer be a slave to a God and live in cringing fear!

~ Joseph Lewis

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

~ Pete Hautman

Pete Hautman Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

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

Stephen Chbosky Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

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

~ Judy Blume

Judy Blume Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

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

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Banned Books Banned Books Week Books Censorship Freedom To Read Ideas Intellectual Freedom

Tolerance, which is one form of love of neighbor, must manifest itself not only in our personal relations, but also in the arena of society as well. In the world of opinion and politics, tolerance is that virtue by which liberated minds conquer the evils of bigotry and hatred. Tolerance implies more than forbearance or the passive enduring of ideas different from our own. Properly conceived, tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. Tolerance quickens our appreciation and increases our respect for our neighbor’s point of view. It goes even further; it assumes a militant aspect when the rights of an opponent are assailed. Voltaire’s dictum, “I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is for all ages and places the perfect utterance of the tolerant ideal.

~ Joshua Loth Liebman

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