Anna Quindlen Quotes

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

I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.

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

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

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

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

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

If you do not like anything in a particular book, then sit and discuss it. Banning a book is not a solution. We have to tackle it ideologically.

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

The prime goal of censorship is to promote ignorance, whether it is done via lying and bowdlerized school texts or by attacking individual books.

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

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

Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can't talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

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

By limiting or denying freedom of speech and expression, we take away a lot of potential. We take away thoughts and ideas before they even have the opportunity to hatch. We build a world around negatives - you can't say, think, or do this or that.

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

Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.

Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward truth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

The long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.

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