"Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."
--Potter Stewart
"He is always the severest censor of the merit of others who has the least worth of his own."
-- Elias Lyman Maggon
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
-- Oscar Wilde
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
-- Noam Chomsky
"The worst part of censorship is XXXXXXXXXXX."
-- Unknown
"A sodomite got very excited looking at a zoology text. Does this make it pornography?"
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-- Voltaire
"I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read."
-- Robertson Davies
"It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body."
-- George Jean Nathan
"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
-- Justice William O. Douglas
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there."
-- Clare Boothe Luce
Here are some of the most banned books of the 1990s:
And from the other side...
"Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people; the [party] organization embraces within its scope only those who do not threaten on psychological grounds to become a brake on the further dissemination of ideas."
-- Adolf Hitler.
"Only the continuous and steady application of the methods for suppressing a doctrine, etc., makes it possible for a plan to succeed."
-- Adolf Hitler.
"Only in the struggle between two philosophies can the weapon of brutal force, persistently and ruthlessly applied, lead to a decision for the side it supports."
-- Adolf Hitler.
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