John Steinbeck Quotes

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Even if the country is run by a Mussolini, free speech will find its way.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Despotism can no more exist in a nation until the liberty of the press be destroyed than the night can happen before the sun is set.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.