Banned Books & Authors, First Amendment Educational Posters

Banned Books Burning Book Art Print “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 [I remember seeing the movie Fahrenheit 451 while in college, when we emerged from the theatre, the bookstore across the street had a line of people waiting to get in.] I Read Banned Books, Poster

The American Heritage Dictionary An Eldon, Missouri library banned the dictionary because it contained 39 “objectionable” words (1978); the Anchorage School Board banned the dictionary for similar reasons, i.e., having slang definitions for words such as “bed,” “knocker,” and “balls” (1987).

The Banned Books page of educational posters include authors and works such as Isabelle Allende, Maya Angelou, Boccaccio (Decameron), Ray Bradbury, Geoffry Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Sir Thomas Malory (Le Morte d'Arthur), Toni Morrison, Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia), Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), Mark Twain, John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men), Voltaire (Candide), Alice Walker (The Color Purple), and Richard Wright (Native Son). Celebrate your freedom to read- American Library Association Banned Books Week.

Censorship Quotes
• "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” ~ Harry S Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950
• “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasent facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” ~ John F. Kennedy, Remarks made on the 20th anniversary of the Voice of America at H.E.W. Auditorium, February 26, 1962
• “Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” ~ Potter Stewart, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
• “Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.” ~ Joseph Addison
• “A home without books is a body without soul.” ~ Cicero
• “I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.” ~ Robertson Davies
• “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” ~ Sigmund Freud
• “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
• “Wrong training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.” ~ Paul Goodman
• “In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom.” ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education
• “A blessing on the printer's art! – Books are the mentors of the heart.” ~ Sarah Josepha Hale
• “Our Constitution was not intended to be used by ... any group to foist its personal religious beliefs on the rest of us.” ~ Katharine Hepburn
• “Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” ~ Winston Churchill
• “[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric.” ~ John Marshall Harlan, Supreme Court justice, 1971
• “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” ~ Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1821
• “I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” Lucy Maud Montgomery
• “The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.” ~ Christopher Morley
• “Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.” ~ Georgia O'Keeffe
• “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.” ~ Pablo Neruda
• “The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by various essences, until it becomes a great conflagration.” ~ Romain Rolland
• “Free societies ... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.” ~ Salman Rushdie
• “A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.” ~ Salman Rushdie
• “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.” ~ Salman Rushdie
• “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” ~ Salman Rushdie
• “It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.” ~ Salman Rushdie
• “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” ~ George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession
• “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.” ~ Gary Snyder
• “Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.” ~ Wole Soyinka
• “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” ~ Mark Twain
• “Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.” ~ Paul Valery
• “All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States – and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
• “The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” ~ Oscar Wilde
• “In comparing men and books, one must always remember this important distinction, – that one can put the books down at anytime.” ~ Nathaniel Parker Willis
• “No two persons ever read the same book.” ~ Edmund Wilson
• “No matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinized works of literature from the historical and biographical point of view, we must be able to tell good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall otherwise not write literary criticism at all, but merely social or political history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case histories from past eras.” ~ Edmund Wilson