Stephen Chbosky Quotes

I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.

Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

People have the right to say what they want to.

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

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.

We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.

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

Censorship has had a long history in the western world. Book banning is as old as books.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

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.

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.

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.

Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want. You can’t impose tolerance top-down.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.