Judy Blume Quotes

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

Every book that is banned is a badge of honor.

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

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.

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

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

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

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

Dictators are as scared of books as they are of cannon.

Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free.… when the clock of civilization can be turned back by burning libraries, by exiling scientists, artists, musicians, writers and teachers; by disbursing universities, and by censoring news and literature and art; an added burden, an added burden is placed on those countries where the courts of free thought and free learning still burn bright. If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own.

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

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.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

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

Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course.

In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth.

It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.

Americans may not always live up to the Bill of Rights, but Americans do not ban books.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

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