David Leavitt Quotes

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can't talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

I do not favor the gag order.

Censorship has had a long history in the western world. Book banning is as old as books.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

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.

I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.

I have no problem with free speech, but free speech and then silencing your opposition - boy, I have a problem with that.

The voice of universe can be silenced but the voice of writers cannot be.

There are so many people that are offended by debate and free speech that sometimes governments cower. It's just way easier to play into the hands of people who are totalitarian.

Everyone loses when voices get stifled.

The only threat is a growing pushback from militant liberals who seek to destroy free expression as they look to limit the speech of anyone who has feelings they find objectionable. It makes comics tentative to push boundaries and freely talk about the thoughts in their heads. That part is terrible for development.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

Free speech isn't dead in Germany and Italy, merely the speakers.

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.

Without freedom of speech, there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.

[T]he German censorship forbade or mutilated my every book, which was like sticking pins into my soul.

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.