Book Bans Quotes

“There are lessons to be learned from history — but generally those lessons are only known to those who read books, not to those who ban them.”
― Brian Dunning

“For a lot of us, it doesn't always feel like you're banning the book itself. Sometimes it feels like you're banning the people that those books are about, like, that you're saying that those lives are lives that should only exist in the shadows, that those lives, though they're 10 feet away, no matter which direction you turn, you keep looking over them.”
― Jason Reynolds

“THE BURNING OF THE BOOKS

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the
Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power.
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven't my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you:
Burn me!”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.
(-- 1823; Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.)”
― Heinrich Heine , Heines Werke, Vol. 5: Almansor; Ratcliff; Der Doktor Faust; Die Göttin Diana (Classic Reprint)

“For libraries, from the time of Ancient Greece and Rome to the public library movement of the nineteenth century, had never simply been collections of books. They were also a public demonstrations of a society's values...”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict

“I understand that some parents don't want their teens to read about sex. Those parents need to police their own children's reading and stop policing mine.”
― Amanda Jones, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America

“The one thing you know about people who ban books is that they don't read books.”
― Percival Everett

“Ban bombs, not books.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“...it was neither "anguish" nor "discomfort" that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message