Quotes from Great Authors for Banned Books Week

As Banned Books Week approaches, it’s important to remember what we do when we censor: we not only restrict the freedoms of the present, we commit violence against the freedoms of the past.
Below are quotes by authors reaching out from the past, in hopes of inspiring us to speak and read freely, confronting our own prejudices as well as others’.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973
“A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.”

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4, 1977
“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.”

Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 1977
“They censor words not the things they denote:
It would create less of a stir to drop a piece of shit on Grant’s tomb
than to write it out in white paint.
Because people recognize that’s what memorials are for – old bums and dogs to shit on.”

More quotes: Signature Reads