Stop Banning Books Quotes

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.

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

I love banned books. I used to read as many to you as I could when you were little, Mac.” “You read me banned books?” I say this sarcastically because I know he’s making it up. “Almost exclusively,” he answers—dead serious. “Charlotte’s Web and the poetry book by—uh—Silverstein—uh.” “Where the Sidewalk Ends?” I say. “And Reynolds—brave … uh …” “As Brave as You? No! How could anyone ban that?” “Yeah. And Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. Remember that one?” “I cried for a whole day.” Mom says, “Where the Wild Things Are. And Tango Makes Three. Melissa.” “Captain Underpants!” Grandad adds. “A lot of younger books you loved. I Am Rosa Parks,” Mom says. “And Last Stop on Market Street and Henry’s Freedom Box, and …” Grandad says, “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry!

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.

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.

It became forbidden to use rational thought. Early Church leader Tertullian, advocating faith rather than rational thought said, “The son of god died: It must needs be believed because it is absurd”. He (Christ) was buried and rose again: it is certain because it is impossible”. Early Catholic leaders consciously proscribed and established as heretical any thinking that might incite challenge. Theodosius I, Emperor of Byzantium issued an edict allowing worship only of the Christian father and son, banning the worship of any deities or pagan ideas, in 389 CE. The writings of the early Church fathers were thus left undisputed by rival philosophies and in time they came to have the same weight as the Bible itself. All of this was revealed “truth”. It is of great importance to understand that most of what has passed down to Christians as “sin” especially sexual sin, had nothing to do with the man called Christ or even of the books (new testament) written by those who never knew him (Mark 60 CE., Mathew 90 CE, Luke 90 CE., John 90 CE.). Instead these views of sin and what it was to be Christian came from a few influential fathers of the early Church, writing as the Roman empire died.Augustine, the greatest early Christian “thinker” of them all said: “This is the disease of curiosity… It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” With these words, Augustine set the spirit and tone for the Dark Ages to come. Early Church fathers greatly feared any challenge to their ideas. Their fear of knowledge led to a shutting down of all free thought. Bishops deliberately outlawed and declared heretical any thoughts that might lead to a more open minded atmosphere. They strove to codify as fact, a narrow interpretation of the gospels. To do so they altered some gospels and outlawed hundreds of others to project the particular “truth” they had chosen. Their thought centered on sin, the depravity of sex and the merit of suffering as much as Christ. Since Christian fathers had little interest in the vast wealth of learning compiled by the pagan Greeks and Romans, they simply stopped copying and disseminating these works and substituted a carefully edited and selected group of books to comprise the Bible. Almost the only other learning that was supported were the works of the early Church fathers designating a selected and censored Christianity.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.

Amid all this, I read Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, a fascinating book by Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, who argues that habits change when they’re harder to practice. Addiction isn’t about rational decisions, she wrote. If it were, Americans would have quit smoking soon after 1964, when the US Surgeon General issued his first report on its risks. American nicotine addicts kept smoking, knowing they were killing themselves, because nicotine had changed their brain chemistry, and cigarettes were everywhere. We stopped smoking, Wood argues, by making it harder to do—adding “friction” to the activity. In other words, we limited access to supply. We removed cigarette vending machines, banned smoking in airports, planes, parks, beaches, bars, restaurants, and offices. By adding friction to smoking, we also removed the brain cues that prompted us to smoke: bars where booze, friends, and cigarettes went together, for example.

If you don't want to lose us," Montana says to the crowd, "stop trying to tell us how to think. It makes it almost impossible to respect you." she squints her eyes at the board. "I know we don't have a prayer to stop the banning of this book, because I know how many of you are Red Brickers. So go ahead. Take it. We'll find it and read it, and we'll post a list at the city library of every book you ban and read every one of them. We'll carry them, front cover out, all over campus, and we'll talk about them, loud, with one another.

86% if the powerful outlaw life; if they ban love, if they constrict liberty with unjust laws . . . then the dandelions must leap up in defiance, in numbers too vast to suppress, with persistence too determined to stop. And why should they wait for violent means to achieve such a goal, when they could embody that world today?