This book is irrelevant to Goodreads because you can’t buy it on Amazon. Also it talks about oppression, censorship etc. and no one really likes reading about that because it’s boring. Yet, let me tell...

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains – editing, and it’s going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to...

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer – he steps forth like a...

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.

I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don’t need to ‘control’ free speech, we need to control ourselves.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.

For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, ‘To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.’ (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

They told me I was not to draw.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a...

And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone...

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;...

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger...

I have a real issue with anyone trying to protect children from their own imaginations. If we cannot acknowledge that a lot of us have a bit of darkness within ourselves, some more than others...

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

If you can’t say “Fuck” you can’t say, “Fuck the government.

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.

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: ‘Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and...

Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation...

Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.

The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.

The term “political correctness” has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell’s “Thought Police” and fascist regimes.

There was something so unutterably ridiculous about the sight of a US company deleting posts accusing it of censorship that many other people began to protest.

Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business...

[O]ne man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at...

Poems are difficult to silence.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered,...

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone’s teeth get cleaner?

An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever...

Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor’s grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

Calling a book “Young Adult” is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. People used to say they like to read books about romance, true crime, comedy, horror or science fiction. But...

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple:...

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid...

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

The key to effective censorship is to make sure no one’s looking, and this time everyone was watching.

The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be….Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.

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...

When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back...

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.

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...

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

They have a way of rising from the ashes,” said Andreus.

We change people through conversation, not through censorship.

We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They...

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in...

For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic...