Vikram Seth Quotes

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

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.

When you publish a book, you do so in part to end the silence. All censorship is silence. I would never, as an author, feel right requiring a young person whose family would object to the book to read it. Just as I would never force that person to read it, I would ask those folks to not force others not to read it. To me, that is just good manners.

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

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

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

I don't want everyone to read anything; I like us all reading different books.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

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

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.

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

... not likely to be read if left alone, but, if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy, in vindication of his right to buy, and read what he pleases.

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.

It is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: 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.

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

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books.

Homo-sexuals should not be censored, but neither should those who oppose their point of view. That's called free speech.

The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.

It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all — except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.

Our people should feel free to express diverse views, pursue unconventional ideas or simply be different.