Suppression of Knowledge Quotes

We know the clerical party; it is an old party. This it is which has found for the truth those two marvelous supporters, ignorance and error. This it is which forbids to science and genius the going beyond the Missal and which wishes to cloister thought in dogmas.

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education.

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

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

We cannot deny that there is still a horde—as I must call them—of people who, like Licinius the Emperor [Roman Emperor, ruled 81-96], denounce learning and the Arts as a danger to the State and hateful in themselves.

This is why I am not religious. If and when we do learn the true secret of the universe, some kind of religion will be there to hide it. To cover it up. To persecute and shred, to burn and destroy. They stay in business by keeping us in the Dark Ages.

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

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.

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

Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.

In governing the people, the leader empties their minds but fills their stomachs, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them [the people] innocent of knowledge and free from desire; he sees that the clever never dare to act [against him].

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.

Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin.

Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

In Victorian England, people were told they should discourage their wives from reading because it would lead them into all sorts of devilish wickedness.

The prime goal of censorship is to promote ignorance, whether it is done via lying and bowdlerized school texts or by attacking individual books.

It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail.

There have always been people like you, Nicholas Flamel. People who think they know what's best, who decide what people should see and read and listen to, who ultimately try to shape how the rest of the world think and acts. I've spent my entire life fighting the likes of you.

It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.

Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery.