Book Bans Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It turns out that some people are coming for your books: people who don’t read. The enemy has never been people who read a book and hate it. It’s often people who don’t read books at all. They used to go after dead authors because dead authors couldn’t fight back, but now they’re going after living authors quite a bit—of course, those authors are mostly Black, mostly queer, and mostly both.”
― Marlon James

“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

“Coffee and Books (Sonnet 2867)

If you love a living writer, buy their books,
support them in a meaningful way,
otherwise it's all just performative love,
which only makes you feel good about yourself,
but does nothing to help the cause
you say you care about.

You won't lose anything by missing out on
two cups of coffee to buy one or two books
by your favorite thinker, poet or novelist,
but that little gesture of tangible support
means more to an author than a hundred likes.

An artist will persevere in their art,
even amidst obscurity, as long as
they physically can, that's their curse -
but ask yourself, what's your role in all this?

Coffee makes you alert, books make you awake.
Booze makes you forget life, books bring you to life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Books can look dangerous or precious, depending on which side you're looking from, from office or from the streets.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth