Gordon B. Hinckley Quotes

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

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.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

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.

Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.

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

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, ... but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free. Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws.

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.

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

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.

There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

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.

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

With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.

What a pathetic play from a pathetic human being.

Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.

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

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it. The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men unless they are its own Otherwise it shuts me up.

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce.

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.