Ludwig Borne Quotes

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

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.

People like to quiet the speech of others.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

It is dangerous to speak the truth to tyrants.

Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

Today, my freedom as a poet is taken by a censor; tomorrow, my freedom as a citizen will be taken by a policeman. Today I am banished from the theater; tomorrow, I shall be banished from the land. Today, I am gagged; tomorrow, I shall be deported. Today a state of siege exists in literature; tomorrow, it will exist in the city.

People are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

There is no functional difference between censorship and the threat of censorship.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder “censorship,” we call it “concern for commercial viability.”

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

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

Everyone loses when voices get stifled.

There are social restrictions where someone could be suppressing someone else's freedom to express themselves.

The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.

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

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

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

When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it's truly dangerous.