#censorship

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 to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death! ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#education #free-speech #paraphrased #death

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. ↗

— Mark Twain

#censorship #christianity #evil #hubris #moral-corruption

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book... ↗

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

#censorship #freedom #libraries #reading #thought

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." [Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950] ↗

— Harry S. Truman

#dissent #freedom-of-speech #opposition #politics #repression

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#books #censorship #freedom #freedom

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent. ↗

— Mark Twain

#fallibility #humor #sin #humor

There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#censorship #imagination

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 vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. ↗

— John Milton

#censorship #ideas #intellect #life

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure way against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is freedom. The surest path to wisdom is liberal education. ↗

— Alfred Whitney Griswold

#education #ideas #education

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions. ↗

— Neil Postman

#independent-thought #technology-addiction #thinking #age