Best 23 quotes in «book burning quotes» category

I'm sure the only act that sells more books than a good banning is a good burning.

I am not a supporter of burning books; but like poison, some books should be kept away from simple minds who can't take in the strong content they provide

If people wrote their reviews on paper and put them into a real, physical library, I am sure that the Goodreads administrators would be very reluctant to pull them down from shelves and burn them. When you can get rid of a piece of writing just by clicking on a few links, there’s a temptation to believe that it’s less serious. But it isn’t. It’s just less clear what you’ve done.

In traditional histories, the rise of humanism is usually portrayed as “a good thing,” but the truth is that the humanists almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy. By discarding the advances made by medieval scholars together with so many of the manuscripts that contained them, they could have set back the advance of science by centuries. Einstein might have had to do the work of Newton. The reason that progress in science was not so held back (although it arguably didn’t move forward as quickly as it might have done) was that the invention of printing had guaranteed that, if nothing else, the old books were preserved. Most people forgot about them, but a few, like Galileo, used the knowledge found within.

No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.

My men are my references. They're waiting outside for the books. They're dangerous." "Men like that always are.

It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people.

Oh my dear, you don't think burning a book destroys a story, do you?

No," said Dina. "We don't burn books." "Who's we?" "People with an ounce of brain.

...people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It's a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them...

The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt! One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as if it had to be Montag and the people he had worked with until a few short hours ago. Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.

Some read to remember the home they had left behind, others to forget the hell that surrounded them. Books uplifted their weary souls and energized their minds…books had the power to sooth an aching heart, renew hope for the future, and provide a respite when there was no other escape.

The very memory that there was any opposition at all to Christianity faded. The idea that philosophers might have fought fiercely, with all they had, against Christianity was – is – passed over. The memory that many were alarmed at the spread of this violently intolerant religion fades from view. The idea that many were not delighted but instead disgusted by the sight of burning and demolished temples was – is – brushed aside. The idea that intellectuals were appalled – and scared – by the sight of books burning in pyres, is forgotten. Christianity told the generations that followed that their victory over the old world was celebrated by all, and the generations that followed believed it.

Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.

Whenever a soldier needed an escape, the antidote to anxiety, relief from boredom, a bit of laughter, inspiration, or hope, he cracked open a book and drank in the words that would transport him elsewhere.

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

A bonfire billowed up. Some in the crowd tossed copies of Ladybird's book into the fire while a librarian pleaded with them not to do that and grabbed a fire extinguisher.* *Really, being a librarian is a much more dangerous job than you realize.

My books, at any rate, deserved to be burned.

Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.

And that's the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the work of the control freaks for them, out of a desire to avoid them.

Books are completely disappearing. Remember in Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman's wife was addicted to interactive television and they sent fireman crews out to burn books? That mission has been largely accomplished in middle-class America and they didn't need the firemen. The interactive electronics took care of it without the violence,

Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen." (Almansor)