Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they’ve been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It’s back on the shelves.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous – they contain ideas.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the...

Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.

You have to be mad in the language you’re mad in.

A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear.

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.

In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices-and all because of fear.

If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society.

When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.

Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It’s harsh and sometimes gritty, but it’s real. Why should we tip toe around that?

If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. … As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights...

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It’s all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.