Ellen Hopkins Quotes

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

Every burned book enlightens the world.

There, where one burns books... one, in the end, burns men.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Don't join the book burners!

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

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

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone.

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

The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.

There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to 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.

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

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

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

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