William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.

Americans may not always live up to the Bill of Rights, but Americans do not ban books.

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

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship.

If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that the state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.

Brown’s core value of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas is bedrock to our capacity to fulfill our mission as a university. This value applies not only when ideas are agreeable and aligned with our own. Protecting the right to free expression and promoting open discourse is even more essential when ideas are divergent, abhorrent or even hurtful.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book so long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

In 2009, the American Library Association recorded 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom.

If you do not like anything in a particular book, then sit and discuss it. Banning a book is not a solution. We have to tackle it ideologically.

The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

I believe America went wrong in terms of respecting the First Amendment, the state of free speech on American college campuses and on the media and in academia.

My books for adults had been previously challenged and banned so I'd had experience with it. I always find it sad and amusing: Sad to think that such archaic and potentially dangerous censorious beliefs still exist, and amused because these censors only make a book more powerful and seductive when trying to ban it.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

I was invited to give the Freshmen Convocation at Florida Gulf Coast University on October 24, 2004. My book The Open Space of Democracy had been selected as one of the "common readers" for the university's 1,050 entering freshmen. On October 6, William Merwin, the president of Florida Gulf Coast, made the decision to "postpone" the convocation. He cited negative statements I had made in print about President Bush. If our colleges and universities are no longer the champions and protectors of free speech, then no voice in this country is safe.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

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

Every book that is banned is a badge of honor.

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

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.