Vachel Lindsay Quotes

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

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.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

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

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

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.

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

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 believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.

Those who want to burn books are either afraid of the ideas contained within the covers or they haven't the courage to stand up for the views which they themselves profess to hold.

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

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

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

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

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.

I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion.

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