Censorship Burning Books Quotes

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

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

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .

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.

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.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

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

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

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.

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.

If people wrote their reviews on paper and put them into a real, physical library, I am sure that the Goodreads administrators would be very reluctant to pull them down from shelves and burn them. When you can get rid of a piece of writing just by clicking on a few links, there’s a temptation to believe that it’s less serious. But it isn’t. It’s just less clear what you’ve done.

I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase people, a belief system, or culture.

And that's the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the work of the control freaks for them, out of a desire to avoid them.

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.

The censors of our age do not yet burn books, they attempt to restrict speech in the name of "offense". The tactics may be different but the desire for control is the same.

You must remember, burn them or they'll burn you...

Books can be burned,” croaked Black. “They have a way of rising from the ashes,” said Andreus.

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony...

No," said Dina. "We don't burn books." "Who's we?" "People with an ounce of brain.

For the book unwritten is the book burned.

And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.

Goose-stepping morons like yourself should try *reading* books instead of *burning* them!

Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature¬—the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

When did it start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn book). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.

When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn book). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship. Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Ask yourself what do people want in this country above all? People want to be happy isn't that right? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation?

How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense? Yes. Yes. Stendahl felt his hands grow cold with the senseless anger.

A once-high society lowers itself when having little to no respect for even a decent honesty, and it's at its lowest when, at last, truth is frowned upon.

Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself?

p. 364 Do you want to be the ones handing out the gasoline cans? Or the ones trying to put out the fire?

One thing people sometimes forget about Fahrenheit 451 is that the government doesn't begin by burning books—it's ordinary people who turn away from reading and the habits of thought and reflection it encourages. When the government starts actively censoring information, most people don't even bat an eye. How important is reading to the health of a democracy like ours?

Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.

The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’. A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping – a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called ‘the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries’. Over a thousand years later, Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: ‘The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.

We are critical of the priests who burned the paper books of the Aztecs because contemporary Europe looked down upon the non-Christian Americans and wanted to destroy their heathen beliefs. But we ourselves have so little esteem for these same beliefs that although the most important ones were recorded by the early Spaniards, we reject them as the fables of primitive nations.

All booksellers who suffered Francoist censorship, police persecution, and fascist bomb attacks were marked for ever by this period and have always believed that a bookshop is more than just a business. We picked up the torch from the last man executed by the Inquisition, a bookseller from Córdoba who was condemned in the nineteenth century for introducing books banned by the Church. And this period made it quite clear, once again, that that reflex action dictatorships have of burning books is no coincidence but the product of two incompatible realities. And it also clearly demonstrated how important independent bookshops are as instruments of democracy." - Jorge Carrión (quoting Francisco Puche), Bookshops: A Reader's History

When the Regime commanded the unlawful books to be burned, teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires. Then a banished writer, one of the best, scanning the list of excommunicated texts, became enraged: he'd been excluded! He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath, to write fierce letters to the morons in power — Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen — Haven't I always reported the truth? Now here you are, treating me like a liar! Burn me!

Truth is the greatest of all national possessions. A state, a people, a system, which suppresses the truth or fears to publish it, deserves to collapse as rapidly and completely as possible.

p. 363 "We cannot stop individuals who read for the sole purpose of confirming their already closely held beliefs... But we can stop the dictators, the tyrants, the bullies who try to impose that method onto others.

that I have something important to say about the dangers of government censorship. Perhaps I do. I can tell you that there are people out there who want the world to only think as they think. In fact, long before Hitler had the power to incite countrywide book burnings, he wrote in Mein Kampf that a smart reader should take away from books only the ideas that support their own beliefs and discard the rest as useless ballast.

Books When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning Books as Weapons, John B. Hench The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Anders Rydell The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy Articles Leary, William M. “Books, Soldiers and Censorship during the Second World War.” American Quarterly Von Merveldt, Nikola. “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books As Agents of Cultural Memory.” John Hopkins University Press Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic “Paris Opens Library of Books Burnt by Nazis.” The Guardian Archives Whisnant, Clayton J. “A Peek Inside Berlin’s Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It.” The Advocate “Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished in Berlin.” NPR’s Fresh Air More The Great Courses: A History of Hitler’s Empire, Thomas Childers “Hitler: YA Fiction Fan Girl,” Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards Podcast Magnus Hirschfeld, Leigh Pfeffer and Gretchen Jones, History Is Gay Podcast “Das Lila Lied,” composed by Mischa Spoliansky, lyrics by Kurt Schwabach

Too many men and governments the life of the human mind is a danger to be feared more than any other danger, and the Word which cannot be purchased, cannot be falsified, and cannot be killed is the enemy most hunted for and hated. It is not necessary to speak of the burning of the books in Germany, or of the victorious lie in Spain, or of the terror of the creative spirit in Russia, or of the hunting and hounding of those in this country who insist that certain truths be told and who will not be silent. These things are commonplace. They are commonplace to such a point that they no longer shock us into anger. Indeed it is the essential character of our time that the triumph of the lie, the mutilation of culture, and the persecution of the Word no longer shock us into anger.

Books can change minds and change worlds, open doors and open minds, plant seeds that can grow into magical or even terrifying things. Stories are things to be loved and respected at the same time; never underestimate the power of them. It's why books are often casualties of censorship; those who ban or burn books are those who are scared of what can be found among their pages.

Few people have to watch their country die. I have had that dubious privilege, and I can tell you that it comes not a as a rebel shout but as a sly whisper. The cracks creep in, insidious as anything I've ever seen. It can start as rumblings about an unreliable press and rumors about political enemies that will threaten you family, your children. It can deepen with each disdainful remark about science and art and literature in a pub on a Friday night. It comes cloaked in patriotism and love of country, and uses that as armor against any criticism.

her chest had been hollowed out. But they were no closer to a good plan for overturning Taft’s censorship policy, either. “You know, I heard about a place the other day,” Harrison said, his vowels all relaxed now with the liquor. “Maybe it would be worth a visit. Though it is quite the haul to Brooklyn.” He reached into his pocket for a pen and notepad and scribbled out an address. “What’s in Brooklyn?” Viv asked, trying to peer over his shoulder. Harrison grinned as he slid her the paper. “Inspiration.” Weak tendrils of hope bloomed from the ash of her defeat

Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren't they? They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway across the world, but the words cannot be unread. They do live on in this library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.

When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours (to burn books). There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship. Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Ask yourself what do people want in this country above all? People want to be happy isn't that right? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation?