Walter Lippmann Quotes

There is more than one way to burn a book.

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

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

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.

As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

I think the trend to control speech - and therefore thought - continues. Because of the freer flow of information now, there's more on the side of free thought.

It distresses me deeply that ideas are not to be circulated freely in the USA if certain persons have their way. One of the things that was great about this country was that I could say anything and that everyone else could say anything and we would compare all possible ideas and arrive at opinions.

This generation is frightened of ideas, or at least it's being suppressed.

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political...And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

As Pa said, censorship encouraged people to believe nonsense.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Hell must be a place where you are only allowed to read what you agree with.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.

... censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books--with one hand.

Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.