Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

I shall stand for freedom of thought and expression in a place where it has been trampled and penalized.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Censorship has had a long history in the western world. Book banning is as old as books.

You have no right to erect your toll gate upon the highways of thought.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Freedom of speech only exists in proportion to indifference to the thing spoken of.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

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

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

I am sure that as soon as speech was invented, efforts to suppress and control it began, and that process of suppression continues unabated.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book so long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.

Censorship in all its forms must be challenged.

Once you get used to censorship, sometimes you self-censor.

I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?

There, where one burns books... one, in the end, burns men.

The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.

Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.

Censorship makes me really angry. I even hate it when people censor themselves.

Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.