Banned Books Week Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty.

Every time they ban the book, it becomes national headlines. I sell more books, so it’s actually lucrative for me. We call Banned Books Week in my house “Big-Assed Royalties Week.

I'm not, like, a book guy, but isn't the point of all this book stuff like what Ms. Croft was teaching us -- that unrestricted access to books allows us to be challenged and changed? To learn new things and to critically think about those things and not be afraid of them? To be better than we were before we read them?

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.

I was putting up a display for Banned Books Week when a mother and her six-year-old daughter stopped to watch. GIRL: What’re you doing? ME: I’m making a display about books that people complained about. They wanted them removed from the library. GIRL: Why? ME: Because they didn’t like what the books were about and didn’t want anyone else to read them, either. GIRL: I don’t get it. ME: I don’t, either. Can you imagine what would happen if every person could choose one book to remove from the library forever? GIRL: [Quietly, with realization.] There wouldn’t be any books left on the shelves. ME: That’s right! It wouldn’t really look like a library anymore, would it? GIRL: We are learning about bullying at school. It sounds like even libraries get bullied sometimes. ME: You are very smart.

       If this isn't a guidebook, what is it? A book of sermons, perhaps.        I preach that air travel be scaled back, as a start, to the level of twenty years ago, further reductions to be considered after all the Boeing engineers have been retrained as turkey ranchers.        The state Game Department should establish a season on helicopters — fifty-two weeks a year, twenty-four hours a day, no bag limit.        Passenger trains must be restored, as a start, to the service of forty years ago and then improved from there.        The Gypsy Bus System must not be regularized (the government would regulate it to death) but publicized cautiously through the underground.        I would discourage, if not ban, trekking to Everest base camp and flying over the Greenland Icecap. Generally, people should stay home. Forget gaining a little knowledge about a lot and strive to learn about a little.

The thing about Zofia and libraries is that she’s always losing library books. She says that she hasn’t lost them, and in fact that they aren’t even overdue, really. It’s just that even one week inside the faery handbag is a lot longer in library-world time. So what is she supposed to do about it? The librarians all hate Zofia. She’s banned from using any of the branches in our area. When I was eight, she got me to go to the library for her and check out a bunch of biographies and science books and some Georgette Heyer novels. My mother was livid when she found out, but it was too late. Zofia had already misplaced most of them.   It’s really hard to write about somebody as if they’re really dead. I still think Zofia must be sitting in her living room, in her house, watching some old horror movie, dropping popcorn into her handbag. She’s waiting for me to come over and play Scrabble.   Nobody is ever going to return those library books now.

The 1833 Factory Act illustrates how bad things had become. It was considered highly controversial to ban children under the age of nine from working in textile factories and to restrict children aged between nine and 13 to working 12 hours a day. Those aged 13–18 could legally work a 69-hour week. As well as running sweatshops, industry owners also portioned out work to unregulated, starving homeworkers in order to undercut factory wages.

The airlines had no choice but to ban every person in the world from flying. Within weeks, and for reasons unknown to them, the airlines all declared bankruptcy.

Charcoal—the very thing Ban is made of—is so messy. I was covered from my brow to my waist like the chimney sweep in the poems of William Blake in every art class of my youth. As a teenager, I used to play truant every Wednesday and catch the train to Pimlico, still in my uniform and with my packed lunch, as if I was going to school. I went to the Tate—every Wednesday—like clockwork—to look—at the illuminated books—of Blake—in a very dark room intended to preserve—the golden ink and peacock green or blue embellishments. The error here is that I chose to write my book in place where these colors and memories are not readily available. There is no bank. Instead, I scream them—I scream the colors each to each—and this is difficult. It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories. For weeks at a time, I stopped writing—and when I returned, Ban was gone. She continued on without me, and what I had to do next will make you dislike me even more than you already do. I had to eat was on the floor. I had to make an artifact out of something that had left no artifacts. I had to put the charcoal in my mouth and choke it down.

Luke 24: But at daybreak on the first day of the week [the women] took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb; but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were puzzling over this, behold, two men in dazzling garments appeared to them. They were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground. They said to them, "Why do you seek the living one among the dead?   He is not here, but he has been raised. Remember what he said to you while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and rise on the third day." And they remembered his words.

As former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the President on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential prodemocracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the President is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. The Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for twenty minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind. They repeat the great mantras of the era: the President is the President of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the President is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the President as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: no one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.

By seventeen, I had written a book on how to kill someone and get away with it using only plants. The Nile publishing services still banned it after a week—something about its “dangerous potential”. I don’t know—sometimes, a girl needs to know how to off a man in an untraceable way. I still didn’t see the issue there.

The most heartening response came not from the book pages in the press but from real incidents in the streets. The girl who was quietly reading Open Veins to her companion in a bus in Bogotá, and finally stood up and read it aloud to all the passengers. The woman who fled from Santiago in the days of the Chilean bloodbath with this book wrapped inside her baby's diapers. The student who went from one bookstore to another for a week in Buenos Aires's Calle Corrientes, reading bits of it in each store because he hadn't the money to buy it. And the most favorable reviews came not from any prestigious critic but from the military dictatorships that praised the book by banning it. For example, Open Veins is unobtainable either in my country, Uruguay, or in Chile; in Argentina the authorities denounced it on TV and in the press as a corrupter of youth, As Blas de Otero remarked, "They don't let people see what I write because I write what I see.

The most heartening response came not from the book pages in the press but from real incidents in the streets. The girl who was quietly reading Open Veins to her companion in a bus in Bogotá, and finally stood up and read it aloud to all the passengers. The woman who fled from Santiago in the days of the Chilean bloodbath with this book wrapped inside her baby's diapers. The student who went from one bookstore to another for a week in Buenos Aires's Calle Corrientes, reading bits of it in each store because he hadn't the money to buy it. And the most favorable reviews came not from any prestigious critic but from the military dictatorships that praised the book by banning it. For example, Open Veins is unobtainable either in my country, Uruguay, or in Chile; in Argentina the authorities denounced it on TV and in the press as a corrupter of youth, As Blas de Otero remarked, "They don't let people see what I write because I write what I see.

The Jewish bookstore in Borough Park sells books that Zeidy doesn’t approve of. He likes me to read in Yiddish, gaudily illustrated tales of legendary tzaddikim, who perform predictable miracles through prayer and exercises in faith, whose stories spill abruptly out over the length of twenty or so pages of monotonous language. He brings home Yiddish weeklies, periodicals depicting news mined from old journals and encyclopedias, outdated essays on midcentury politics or Jewish cantorial music. I know there are other works written in Yiddish, but they are banned. In fact there is a whole world of Yiddish literature I will never be allowed to read. Sholem Aleichem is forbidden in this house; he was an apikores, a so-called liberated Jew. Satmar people do not read anything written by liberated Jews, even if it is written in the holy language of Yiddish.