Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

I bought some books in order to learn the first principles of philosophy.

The problem with being an avid reader in China is that there were few books to be read.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

The standard of what offends 'the common conscience of the community' conflicts ... with the command of the First Amendment. ... Certainly that standard would not be an acceptable one if religion, economics, politics or philosophy were involved. How does it become a constitutional standard when literature treating with sex is concerned? Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to 'sexual impurity' or has a tendency to 'excite lustful thoughts.' This is community censorship in one of its worst forms...

As far as reading is concerned, I like historical and political books and works of art.

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

The helpful thought for which you look Is written somewhere in a book.

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.

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

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.

Read good, big important things.

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

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

Here's to the good Nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!

Half my life is in book's written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages.

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

I heard that Trump said even smelling a book makes him feel tired.

Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.

People ask me what book politicians should read. They should read the life of Mahatma Gandhi.

When I was a kid, all I liked were books and chocolate.

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

When [books ban] happened, I felt completely alone and that was scary and sad.