Book-Burning/Quotes

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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, Essays on Education

"To read to many books is harmful."

—Mao Zedong

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but... do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless warriors be used, as good almost kill a Man a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

—John Milton, Areopagitica

"Burning is no answer."

—Camille Desmoulines, reply to Robespierre, January 7, 1794, on burning his newspaper Vieux Cordelier.

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books."

—Sigmund Freud, 1933

"The paper burns, but the words fly away."

—Akiba ben Joseph

"...when you do become cemented into a position of power that rides on the suppression of human rights and universal freedoms, one of the important ways of demonstrating that all expression is ultimately under your control is with the unforgettable spectacle of a mass book burning. There is nothing like watching the last repositories of their culture, history and ideas being burned away to suck the spirit out of a repressed people."

—Cracked, "8 Unexpected Downsides of the Switch to E-Books" (#4: Book Burnings Will Have Less Visual Impact)