158 quotes found
"Suppression is the instrument of a totalitarian dictatorship; we don’t talk of that sort of thing in a free country! We simply take a democratic decision not to publish."
"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."
"While people are always quick to take up the cudgels against censorship of the press, or radio, any crackpot can advocate new forms of censorship for the movies, and not a voice is lifted in protest. There's something illogical about this indifference to censorship of the movies. After all, it's just as much a medium of public expression as are the radio and newspapers."
"For several years now, various groups have urged the banning of crime pictures on the ground that they influence youths to turn to crime. When Jimmy Walker was minority leader of the New York legislature, there was a censorship fight on the floor of the House. A powerful group of pious bluenoses wanted to bar from circulation good books that dared to mention certain well-known facts of life. The bluenoses said the books were indecent, bawdy, lascivious and would lead their young and innocent daughters astray. Jimmy stood the debate as long as he could, then he said, "I have been around a good deal, but I have never heard of a woman's being seduced by a book." That killed the censorship bill."
"Censorship is the mother of metaphor."
"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."
"Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."
"Captain Beatty: Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it."
"The Government controlled the filmstock supply at this time and all film scripts for films to be made in the UK had to be submitted to the Ministry of Information. If a film was not approved then no film stock would be supplied. In 1939 the BBFC still operated under the broad guiding principles of former President TP O’Connor’s list of ‘grounds for deletion’ which were first published in 1916. These essentially barred: * References to controversial politics * Relations of capital and labour * Scenes tending to disparage public characters and institutions * Realistic horrors of warfare * Scenes and incidents calculated to afford information to the enemy * Incidents having a tendency to disparage our Allies * Scenes holding up the King’s uniform to contempt or ridicule * The exploitation of tragic incidents of the war The aim of all these constraints was to try and ensure that the kinds of films that came out during this period dealt with war in ways that were unlikely to be particularly upsetting or challenging for audiences."
"In some respects, the life of a censor is more exhilarating than that of an emperor. The best the emperor can do is snip off the heads of men and women, who are mere mortals. The censor can decapitate ideas which but for him might have lived forever."
"The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, decided all by itself that radio and television were the only two parts of American life not protected by the free speech provisions of the first amendment to the Constitution. I'd like to repeat that, because it sounds... vaguely important! The FCC—an appointed body, not elected, answerable only to the president—decided on its own that radio and television were the only two parts of American life not protected by the first amendment to the Constitution. Why did they decide that? Because they got a letter from a minister in Mississippi! A Reverend Donald Wildman in Mississippi heard something on the radio that he didn't like. Well, Reverend, did anyone ever tell you there are two KNOBS on the radio? Two. Knobs. On the radio. Of course, I'm sure the reverend isn't that comfortable with anything that has two knobs on it... But hey, reverend, there are two knobs on the radio! One of them turns the radio OFF, and the other one [slaps his head] CHANGES THE STATION! Imagine that, reverend, you can actually change the station! It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was founded upon. Look it up in the library, reverend, if you have any of them left when you've finished burning all the books."
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
"The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains."
"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."
"People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like — they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?"
"I can not believe that this is any bona fide effort to suppress immorality. There are too many signs about it which compel to the sorrowful conclusion that there has grown up among us a Society, whose original aim may have been to suppress vice, but which has now fallen under control of persons with other aims. It would appear that to these the circulation of many thousands of a book they call vicious is of little importance compared with making a sensation, and parading their own spotlessness before the public; and beyond this, it is to be feared that a still baser influence has been at work to degrade this association of (originally, no doubt) well-meaning, though weak-minded people. There is money in it. A good deal of patronage and wealth has gone to it in the past, and its agents are highly paid; and if this stream of money and patronage is to continue to flow and gladden the host of agents, they must keep up a show of activity. They must always be attitudinising as purifiers of society. If the nests of crime and vice are trampled out, and the funds begin to fall low, they must try and make their subscribers think there are nests where there are none; and, knowing well how unpopular Freethinkers are, how few friends they have in high places, they found among them a book which repeated the details of ordinary physiological and medical books—a book whose pages, with all their faults, are nowhere of biblical impurity. It must have brought their secretaries, and their lawyers, and their secret-service agents, a golden Pactolus from orthodox purses to thus prove that the society might do injury to Freethinkers under cover of attacking immorality. The old privilege of the orthodox to imprison their opponents—the privilege so loved, but lost—must seem about to come back again, when it has been decided that facts familiar in the libraries of medicine and science cannot be printed by Freethinkers in a form accessible to the people without imprisonment. They know that many of these Freethinkers value their freedom highly enough to go to gaol for it, and they are, no doubt, hoping for more victims and a flourishing business with plenty of vice to suppress."
"But while we may smile at these traders in corruption, the degree to which they have been able to infect the Bench, and through it large numbers of the least thoughtful people, supplies grave cause for alarm. There are some ugly chapters in English history connected with attempts to suppress conviction, to throttle its expression under pretence of its being wicked or immoral. But we are so far away from those eras, that many hardly remember their lesson; which is a pity, for such lessons are costly, and, if forgotten, can sometimes only be recovered at a heavier cost. The lesson taught by every effort to repress honest and public discussion of any subject whatever is, that all such efforts are revolutionary. Every honest man in prison is tenfold more dangerous than fire burning near fire-damp. The majesty of law is defiled when the innocent are punished deliberately with the guilty. Edward Truelove, in prison, has exchanged places with his judges, and his sentence on them, for their most immoral judgment, will be affirmed when their decisions have become byewords of judicial prejudice and folly. They who menace man’s freedom of thought and speech are tampering with something more powerful than gun powder. They who suppress by force even an erroneous book honestly meant for human welfare, are justifying all the crimes ever committed against human intelligence; they are laying again the trains that have always ended in revolution; and, right as it is to suppress books notoriously meant for corruption, and punish the vile who through them seek selfish ends at cost of the public good, even that is a task requiring the utmost care and wisdom. Better that many base men and many bad books escape, than that one honest woman be robbed of her child by violence calling itself law, or one honest man suffer the felon’s chain from the very hand provided for protection of honesty."
"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. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."
"Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech."
"Under our First Amendment, a censorship law would have to be written in broad general language and could not be directed at specific religious, ethnic, racial, or political groups. Any such law could be misused by politicians to censor their political enemies or other "undesirable" groups."
"[C]lear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money."
"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
"Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don’t like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts". This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win."
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
"We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That's why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts."
"Censorship assumes certainty, whereas free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry allows for the discovery of our own ignorance and enables the project of human knowledge to succeed."
"If the human body is obscene, complain to the manufacturer!"
"All the Sixties were complicated, you know. On the one hand it was funny too, you know; on the other hand it was cruel, you know. The communists are so cruel, because they impose one taste on everybody, on everything, and who doesn't comply with their teachings and with their ideology, is very soon labeled pervert, you know, or whatever they want you call it, or counterrevolutionary or whatever. And then the censorship itself, that's not the worst evil. The worst evil is — and that's the product of censorship — is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. I am stopping to being honest, I am becoming hypocrite — and that's what they wanted, they wanted everybody to feel guilty, they were, you know... And also they were absolutely brilliant in one way, you know: they knew how effective is not to punish somebody who is guilty; what Communist Party members could afford to do was mind-boggling: they could do practically anything they wanted — steal, you know, lie, whatever. What was important — that they punished if you're innocent, because that puts everybody, you know, puts fear in everybody."
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed."
"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
"With very few exceptions, philosophers do not know much science and do not understand it, which is quite natural because science lies beyond the boundaries of typical philosophical subjects such as ethics, aestetics, and gnosiology. But while in the free countries philosophers are quite harmless, in the dictatorial countries they constitute a great danger for the development of science. In Russia, state philosophers are bred in the Communist Academy in Moscow and are placed in all the educational and research institutions to prevent the professors and researchers from falling into idealistic, capitalistic heresies. The state philosophers are usually familiar with the subject of the research institution they are going to supervise, being either former schoolteachers or having taken in the academy a one-semester course on the subject in question. But they rank in the their power above the scientific directors of the institution and can veto any research project on publication which deviates from the correct ideology. One notable example of philosophical dictatorship in Russian science was the prohibition of Einstein's theory of relativity on the ground that it denied world ether, "the existence of which follows directly from the philosophy of dialectical materialism". It is interesting to note that the existence of the "world ether" was doubted long before Einstein by Engels, who in one of his letter to friend wrote "...the world ether, if it exists"."
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure way against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is freedom. The surest path to wisdom is liberal education."
"We wish to silence the cry of class against class, and stifle the party appeal to class, so that we may ensure tranquility in our own freedom."
"In late April and early May the World Socialist Web Site, which identifies itself as a Trotskyite group that focuses on the crimes of capitalism, the plight of the working class and imperialism, began to see a steep decline in readership. The decline persisted into June. Search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site has been reduced by 75 percent overall. And the site is not alone. ... The reductions coincided with the introduction of algorithms imposed by Google to fight “fake news.” Google said the algorithms are designed to elevate “more authoritative content” and marginalize “blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.” It soon became apparent, however, that in the name of combating “fake news,” Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are censoring left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites. The 150 most popular search terms that brought readers to the World Socialist Web Site, including “socialism,” “Russian Revolution” and “inequality,” today elicit little or no traffic."
"The steady march towards heavy handed state censorship was accelerated by the Obama administration that charged ten government employees and contractors, eight under the Espionage Act, for disclosing classified information to the press. The Obama administration in 2013 also seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters to uncover who leaked the information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. This ongoing assault by the Democratic Party has been accompanied by the disappearing on social media platforms of several luminaries on the far right, including Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who were removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube. Content that is true but damaging to the Democratic Party, including the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, have been blocked by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Algorithms have since at least 2017 marginalized left-wing content, including my own. The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power. The pandering by press and human rights organizations, tasked with being sentinels of freedom, to the Democratic Party, only contributes to the steady tightening of the vice of press censorship. There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China’s totalitarianism capitalism."
"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
"How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."
"To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor? Isn't a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what's fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched? Did you hear any speaker in the opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you – relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you'd give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?"
"I am not going to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which one would be the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praise him. The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of a means of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, and even falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects just what it is, and not to feign it otherwise. I am not ready to say that the harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared with it, and the filthy thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it does not corrupt the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader's tongue and pen to sin in kind."
"Despite efforts to block access, Chinese netizens are discussing a report by Australia’s public service broadcaster ABC about how China uses artificial intelligence to erase online content that directly or indirectly references the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. …Experts are raising alarms about AI-induced censorship, which leads to a growing sense of historical amnesia, as symbols, images, and even indirect references are systematically erased. This phenomenon affects not only the collective memory of the Chinese populace but also the global understanding of these pivotal events. The use of AI in this context highlights significant ethical concerns regarding technology’s power to shape and control information."
"I have collected all the writings of the Empire and burnt those which were of no use."
"The vast number of titles which are published each year—all of them are to the good, even if some of them may annoy or even repel us for a time. For none of us would trade freedom of expression and of ideas for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it."
"It is often assumed that the true victim of censorship is the person engaged in speaking. They are victims, but so, too, is everyone else. If your thoughts are censored, then I am [unable] to hear them. If my thoughts are censored, you are not allowed to hear my opinions and judge them against your own. As such, censorship makes each person a prisoner of their own thoughts and makes society barren silos."
"The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored."
"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason."
"I thought the work would be very innocent, and one which might be confided to the reason of any man; not likely to be much read if let alone, but, if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy, in vindication of his right to buy, and to read what he pleases."
"“One of the most insidious intended effects of government censorship is self-censorship,” wrote Federalist CEO Sean Davis in a post on X. “By punishing others for what they say and believe, tyrannical governments terrorize their citizens’ own thoughts by creating every incentive for them to just be quiet.” … Writing the dissenting opinion in Murthy v. Missouri Wednesday, Justice Samuel Alito warned Americans would come to regret the continuation of an unconstitutional censorship regime."
"When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful."
"They can't censor a gleam in the eye."
"The literature of today, with its conscientious striving toward sincerity, must necessarily contain large amounts of matter repugnant to those who hold the hypocritical nineteenth-century view of the world. It need not be vulgarly presented, but it cannot be excluded if art is to express life. That censors actually do seek to remove this legitimate and essential matter, and that they would if given greater power do even greater harm, is plainly shewn by the futile action against “Jurgen”, and the present ban on “Ulysses”, both significant contributions to contemporary art. And, ironically enough, this same censorship blandly tolerates, through legal technicalities, infinite sewers full of frankly and frivolously nasty drivel without the least pretence of aesthetic or intellectual significance."
"Congress passed this statute against obscenity for the protection of the great mass of our people; the unusual literator can, or thinks he can, protect himself. The people do not exist for the sake of literature, to give the author fame, the publisher wealth, and the book a market. On the contrary, literature exists for the sake of the people, to refresh the weary, to console the sad, to hearten the dull and downcast, to increase man's interest in the world, his joy of living, and his sympathy in all sorts and conditions of men. Art for art's sake is heartless and soon grows artless; art for the public market is not art at all, but commerce; art for the people's service is a noble, vital, and permanent element of human life.The public is content with the standard of salability; the prigs with the standard of preciosity. The people need and deserve a moral standard; it should be a point of honor with men of letters to maintain it."
"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
"The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it."
"Censored This comic contains numerous references to the DeCSS code used to bypass the Content Scrambling System of DVD’s, which, by order of Judge Lewis Kapalan, is illegal to reproduce in any way. We apologize for the inconvenience, but speech that damages the profits of our corporate friends is NOT protected by the First Amendment. Thank you."
"Huey: Why is it perfectly legal to post a diagram of how to build a bomb on the net, but you can’t post a code that descrambles DVDs?"
"If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid."
"Proponents of using government authority to censor certain undesirable images and comments on the airwaves resort to the claim that the airways belong to all the people, and therefore it's the government's responsibility to protect them. The mistake of never having privatized the radio and TV airwaves does not justify ignoring the first amendment mandate that "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech." When everyone owns something, in reality nobody owns it. Control then occurs merely by the whims of the politicians in power. From the very start, licensing of radio and TV frequencies invited government censorship that is no less threatening than that found in totalitarian societies."
"In preparing scenarios, you will save yourself needless effort if you will keep in mind the basic censorship regulations of the key states of the country. The territories which these states represent are extremely rich fields for the moving picture, and production companies make every effort to accede to their censorship rules. Unfortunately, the censors are reluctant to publish their rulings."
"He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true."
"Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only."
"Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal as a solution to online scientific misinformation. [...] there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach [...] and there is a risk that content removal may cause more harm than good by driving misinformation content (and people who may act upon it) towards harder-to-address corners of the internet."
"Self-censorship is the worst form of censorship because you have internalized the goals of the regime and decided to enact [such goals] on their behalf."
"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."
"Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still."
"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."
"Every time you get a censor, you get a fool, and worse yet a knave, pretending to be a guardian of morality, while acting as a guardian of class greed."
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Long ago those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free. In the realm of expression they put their faith, for better or for worse, in the enlightened choice of the people, free from the interference of a policeman's intrusive thumb or a judge's heavy hand. So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance."
"It seems that Wikipedia.com, that splendid source for all kinds of information, is no longer dedicated to the truth, assuming it ever was. Individuals who have tried to edit the pages about Barack Obama — to reflect the incontrovertible fact that he is not God, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan — report that their contributions have vanished within minutes of posting them, and that they, themselves, have been suspended for three days following each 'infraction'. When some sort of official at Wikipedia was contacted about this, she stonewalled, claiming that this censorship was the work of 'volunteers', implying they were somehow beyond control of Wikipedia itself. Like the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge were "volunteers.""
"You know, there are some words I've known since I was a schoolboy: 'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.' Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today."
"The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. … "Winston Churchill said "The first casualty of War is always Truth." Churchill also said "In wartime, the Truth is so precious that it should always be surrounded by a bodyguard of Lies." That wisdom will not be much comfort to babies born last week. The first news they get in this world will be News subjected to Military Censorship. That is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information." That is routine behavior in Wartime — for all countries and all combatants — and it makes life difficult for people who value real news. Count on it."
"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."
"The key to national greatness lies in sustaining and instilling our shared national identity. That means focusing on what we have in common: the heritage that we all share. At the center of this heritage is also a robust belief in free expression, free speech, and open debate. Only if we forget who we are, and how we got here, could we ever allow political censorship and blacklisting to take place in America. It's not even thinkable. Shutting down free and open debate violates our core values and most enduring traditions. In America, we don't insist on absolute conformity or enforce rigid orthodoxies and punitive speech codes. We just don't do that. America is not a timid nation of tame souls who need to be sheltered and protected from those with whom we disagree. That's not who we are. It will never be who we are."
"But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me."
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
"There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
"He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government. Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned. Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue."
"I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism."
"You only silence critics when you have something to hide."
"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."
"It is an inconvenient truth that early-7th-century Islamic book-burners copied 4th-century Christians."
"Burning the Bible was an intentional act: it happened all over Germany, in public for all to see, and both those who perpetrated the act and those who watched it perceived it as a transgression whether they supported or opposed the burning."
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."
"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where one begins by burning books, one will end up burning people.)"
"Sultan Sikander (Aurangzeb) was the most bigoted of the Sultans, and burnt the books of the Hindus whenever and wherever he got them."
"It is not surprising therefore that many Muslim heroes in their hour of victory just set libraries to flames. They razed shrines to the ground, burnt books housed in them and killed Brahman, Jain and Buddhist monks who could read them. The narrative of Ikhtiyaruddin Bakhtiyar Khalji’s campaigns in Bihar is full of such exploits... Similarly, only one instance may be given to show how the Indians tried to protect their books from marauding armies. In the Jinabhadra-Sureshwar temple located in the Jaisalmer Fort in Rajasthan, I saw a library of Jain manuscripts called Jain Cyan Bhandar located in a basement, 5 storeys deep down, each storey negotiated with the help of a staircase, and in each floor manuscripts are stacked. The top of the cell is covered with a large stone slab indistinguishable from other slabs of the flooring to delude the invader. Such basement libraries set up for security against vandalism are also found in other places in Rajasthan."
"For when Alexander conquered the kingdom of Darius the king, he had all [the books] translated into the Greek language. Then he burnt all the original copies which were kept in the treasure-houses of Darius, and killed everyone whom he thought might be keeping any of them. Except that some books were saved through the protection of those who safeguarded them."
"The fundamentalist forces in Kashmir that were in the processes of spreading their tentacles opened their agenda with the declaration of war on books that were not of Islamic brand and hue... The Jammaat-i-Islami as the rabid fundamentalist organisation launched a campaign to ransack libraries in the educational institutions and flared ban on books which did not correspond to their fake knowledge about man, world and God. The Kashmir university funded by the University Grants Commission and headed by the Governor of the state was denuded of two thousand books including the works of Milton, G.B. Shaw, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and tomes on Hindu Philosphy in a Nazi style. ... The library of the Information Centre run by Government of India was looted by the progeny of Halaku Khan and set on fire. ... The Muslim marauders could not but suppress their innate urge and proclivity to loot, plunder and arson the properties and estates left behind by the fleeing Pandits. They desecrated and destructed their temples, harvested their crops and annexed their lands and to cap it all looted and burnt their books as repositories of learning and knowledge"
"World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, "the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.""
"Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay. All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter."
"I never taught of book burning, no matter how they were silly, mendacious or propaganda-like because I guide myself by the principle that every book burning was just an introduction to burning (of people) at the stake."
"All books written in Sanskrit and Marathi, whatever their subject matter, were seized by the Inquisition and burnt on the suspicion that they might deal with idolatry. It is probable that valuable non-religious literature dealing with art, literature, sciences, etc., was destroyed indiscriminately, as a consequence. These activities had been initiated in Goa even before the establishment of the Inquisition."
"The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect."
"La propagande de l'erreur est libre: liberté de pensée!"
"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."
"“The biggest gift from God to man is a free mind,” [Uyghur-man Örkesh Davlet] said."
"If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era."
"But arms – instrumentalities, as President Wilson called them – are not sufficient by themselves. We must add to them the power of ideas. People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?"
"Liberty of conscience was the one great value which the common people had preserved from the Commonwealth. The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all: but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own. In the "unsteepled" places of worship there was room for a free intellectual life and for democratic experiments with "members unlimited". Against the background of London Dissent, with its fringe of deists and earnest mystics, William Blake seems no longer the cranky untutored genius that he must seem to those who know only the genteel culture of the time. On the contrary, he is the original yet authentic voice of a long popular tradition. If some of the London Jacobins were strangely unperturbed by the execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette it was because they remembered that their own forebears had once executed a king. No one with Bunyan in their bones could have found many of Blake's aphorisms strange: "The strongest poison ever known \ Game from Caesar's laurel crown.""
"Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution or sanity or reasoned scepticism or on occasion even as courage."
"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."
"Mankind has always recognized the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings. But it has always recognized that entertainment can be of a character either helpful or harmful to the human race, and, in consequence, has clearly distinguished between: Entertainment which tends to improve the race, or, at least, to recreate and rebuild human being exhausted with the realities of life; and Entertainment which tends to degrade human beings, or to lower their standards of life and living. Hence the moral importance of entertainment is something which has been universally recognized. It enters intimately into the lives of men and women and affects them closely; it occupies their minds and affections during leisure hours, and ultimately touches the whole of their lives. A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as the standard of his work. So correct entertainment raises the whole standard of a nation. Wrong entertainment lowers the whole living condition and moral ideals of a race."
"Art enters intimately into the lives of human beings. Art can be morally good, lifting men to higher levels. <br This has been done thru good music, great painting, authentic fiction, poetry, drama. Art can be morally evil in its effects. This is the case clearly enough with unclean art, indecent books, suggestive drama. The effect on the lives of men and women is obvious."
"The motion pictures which are the most popular of modern arts for the masses, have their moral quality from the minds which produce them and from their effects on the moral lives and reactions of their audiences. This gives them a most important morality. (1) They reproduce the morality of the men who use the pictures as a medium for the expression of their ideas sand ideals. (2) They affect the moral standards of those who thru the screen take in these ideas and ideals. In the case of the motion pictures, this effect may be particularly emphasized because no art was so quick and so widespread an appeal to the masses. It has become in an incredibly short period, the art of the multitudes."
"The motion picture has special Moral obligations: (A) Most arts appeal to the mature. This art appeals at once to every class-mature, immature, developed, undeveloped, law abiding, criminal. Music has its grades for different classes; so has literature and drama. This art of the motion picture, combining as it does the two fundamental appeals of looking at a picture and listening to a story, at once reaches every class of society. (B) Because of the mobility of a film and the ease of picture distribution, and because of the possibility of duplicating positives in large quantities, this art reaches places unpenetrated by other forms of art."
"Psychologically, the larger the audience, the lower the moral mass resistance to suggestion."
"No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it. This is done: (a) When evil is made to appear attractive, and good is made to appear unattractive. (b) When the sympathy of the audience is thrown on the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil, sin. The same thing is true of a film that would throw sympathy against goodness, honor, innocence, purity, honesty."
"“Sympathy with a person who sins”, is not the same as sympathy with the sin or crime of which he is guilty. We may feel sorry for the plight of the murderer or even understand the circumstances which led him to his crime; we may not feel sympathy with the wrong which he has done. The presentation of evil is often essential for art, or fiction, or drama. This in itself is not wrong, provided: (a) That evil is not presented alluringly. Even if later the evil is condemned or punished, it must not be allowed to appear so attractive that the emotions are drawn to desire or approve so strongly that later they forget the condemnation and remember only the apparent joy of the sin. (b) That thru out the presentation, evil and good are never confused and that evil is always recognized clearly as evil. (c) That in the end the audience feels that evil is wrong and good is right."
"Law, natural or divine, must not be belittled, ridiculed, nor must a sentiment be created against it. (A) The presentation of crimes against the law, human or divine, is often necessary for the carrying out of the plot. But the presentation must not throw sympathy with the criminal as against the law, nor with the crime as against those who must punish it. (B) The courts of the land should not be presented as unjust. III. As far as possible, life should not be misrepresented, at least not in such a way as to place in the minds of youth false values on life."
"In accordance with the general principles laid down: (1) No plot theme should definitely side with evil and against good. (2) Comedies and farces should not make fun of good, innocence, morality or justice. (3) No plot should be so constructed as to leave the question of right or wrong in doubt or fogged. (4) No plot should by its treatment throw sympathy of the audience with sin, crime, wrong-doing or evil. (5) No plot should present evil alluringly."
"Vulgarity may be carefully distinguished from obscenity. Vulgarity is the treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant subjects which decent society considers outlawed from normal conversation. Vulgarity in the motion pictures is limited in precisely the same way as in decent groups of men and women by the dictates of good taste and civilized usage, and by the effect of shock, scandal, and harm on those coming in contact with this vulgarity. (1) Oaths should never be used as a comedy element. Where required by the plot, the less offensive oaths may be permitted (2) Vulgar expressions come under the same treatment as vulgarity in general. Where women and children to see the film, vulgar expressions (and oaths) should be cut to the absolute essentials required by the situation. (3) The name of Jesus Christ should never be used except in reverence."
"Obscenity is concerned with immorality, but has the additional connotation of being common, vulgar and coarse. (1) Obscenity in fact, that is, in spoken word, gesture, episode, plot, is against divine and human law, and hence altogether outside the range of subject matter or treatment. (2) Obscenity should not be suggested by gesture, manner, etc., (3) An obscene reference, even if it is expected to be understandable to only the more sophisticated part o the audience, should not be introduced. (4) Obscene language is treated as all obscenity."
"Costume GENERAL PRINCIPLES (1) The effect of nudity or semi-nudity upon the normal man or woman, and much more upon the young person, has been honestly recognized by all law-makers and moralists. (2) Hence the fact that the nude or semi-nude body may be beautiful does not make its use in the films moral. For in addition to its beauty, the effect of the nude or semi-nude on the moral individual must be taken into consideration. <br (3) Nudity or semi-nudity used simply to put a “punch” into a picture comes under the head of immoral actions as treated above. It is immoral in its effect upon the average audience. (4) Nudity, or semi-nudity is sometimes apparently necessary for the plot. Nudity is never permitted. Semi-nudity may be permitted under conditions. PARTICULAR PRINCIPLES (1) The more intimate parts of the human body are the male and female organs and the breasts of a woman. (a) They should never be uncovered. (b) They should not be covered with transparent or translucent material. (c) They should not be clearly and unmistakably outlined by the garment."
"Dancing (1) Dancing in general is recognized as an art and a beautiful form of expressing human emotion. (2) Obscene dances are those: (a) Which suggest or represent sexual actions, whether performed solo or with two or more; (b) Which are designed to excite an audience, to arouse passions, or to cause physical excitement. HENCE: Dances of the type known as "Kooch" or "Can-Can," since they violate decency in these two ways, are wrong. Dances with movement of the breasts, excessive body movement while the feet remain stationary, the so-called "belly dances" these dances are immoral, obscene, and hence altogether wrong."
"In July of 1934 an editorial in The Commonweal, a semi-official organ of the Catholic church, declared that the “muck merchants” of Hollywood, that “fortress of filth” that had been destroying the moral fiber of the American people, had finally been brought to its knees by the Catholic church and its Legion of Decency. In less than a year the church had recruited millions of Americans of all religious denominations to pledge not to attend “immoral” movies. With a national depression already threatening Hollywood’s financial stability, movie czar Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of American (MPPDA), accepted the terms of surrender dictated by the church and its legions. The truce struck between Hays and the Most Reverend John T. McNicholas, Archbishop of Cincinnnati, and written and negotiated by Martin Quigley, publisher of “The Motion Picture Herald”, signaled a turning point in a 30-year battle among religious leaders, women’s groups, civic organizations, municipal and state censorship boards, and the motion picture industry over the content of Hollywood films. The victory took the form of a new agency inside the MPPDA, the industry's trade association. The Catholics demanded that Hays create Production Code Administration (PCA) to enforce the censorship code adopted by the industry in 1930. The code, written by a Catholic priest, had not, in the opinion of the church, been enforced. The church demanded, and Hays agreed, that a staunch lay Catholic, namely Joseph I. Breen, would head the PCA and interpret the code. To guarantee that Breen would have enforcement powers, the agreement forced every studio to submit scripts to the PCA before production. The studios agreed that no production would begin without script approval and that no film would be distributed with a PCA seal of approval. The MPPDA was given power to levy a $25,000 fine against any violator. But that was not all. The church demanded that Hollywood permanently withdraw from circulation films it viewed as “immoral” and that local theater owners be empowered to cancel any film currently in circulation if they judged it to be “immoral.”"
"The comic-book medium, having come of age on the American cultural scene, must measure up to its responsibilities. Constantly improving techniques and higher standards go hand in hand with these responsibilities. To make a positive contribution to contemporary life, the industry must seek new areas for developing sound, wholesome entertainment. The people responsible for writing, drawing, printing, publishing, and selling comic books have done a commendable job in the past, and have been striving toward this goal. Their record of progress and continuing improvement compares favorably with other media in the communications industry. An outstanding example is the development of comic books as a unique and effective tool for instruction and education. Comic books have also made their contribution in the field of letters and criticism of contemporary life."
"(1) Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals."
"(2) If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity."
"(3) Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority."
"(5) Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation."
"(6) In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds."
"(7) Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, the gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated."
"(1) No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title."
"(2) All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted."
"(3) All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated."
"(4) Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader."
"(5) Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited."
"(1) Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden."
"(1) Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure."
"(2) Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable."
"(4) Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities."
"(2) Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Rape scenes, as well as sexual abnormalities, are unacceptable."
"(6) Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested."
"(7) Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden."
"(7) Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals."
"So he said it can't be a Black [person]. So I said, 'For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!' So he said, 'No, it can't be a Black'. Bill [Gaines] just called him up [later] and raised the roof, and finally they said, 'Well, you gotta take the perspiration off'. I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, 'Fuck you', and he hung up."
"[T]he list of requirements a film needs to receive a G rating was doubled, and there were no other acceptable ratings!"
"This really made 'em go bananas in the Code czar's office. 'Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us', recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. 'I went in there with this story and Murphy says, "It can't be a Black man". But ... but that's the whole point of the story!' Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. 'Listen', he told Murphy, 'you've been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business'. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. 'This is ridiculous!' he bellowed. 'I'm going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I'll sue you'. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. 'All right. Just take off the beads of sweat'. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. 'Fuck you!' they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form."
"RINGGENBERG: Well, given that the Comics Code expressly forbid the use of the words Weird, Horror and Terror, did you feel that your company was being particularly targeted?"
"RINGGENBERG: Let's jump ahead a little bit, to the New Direction comics. In Impact #4 you had a story called "The Lonely One", which was about prejudice against Jews. The Jewish in the story had a very bland name. It was "Miller"."
"My first assignment, as a new art assistant, was to remove cleavages and lift up low cut blouses on Katy Keene."
"His sometimes suggestive storytelling – and he was one of the best – almost cost him his job. When his pencilled stories came in, the characters were dressed on one page only. The inker, a woman by the name of terry Szenics, would have to clothe them on the remaining pages."
"I could understand them; they were like lawyers, people who take things literally and technically. The Code mentioned that you mustn't mention drugs and, according to their rules, they were right. So I didn't even get mad at them then. I said, 'Screw it' and just took the Code seal off for those three issues. Then we went back to the Code again. I never thought about the Code when I was writing a story, because basically I never wanted to do anything that was to my mind too violent or too sexy. I was aware that young people were reading these books, and had there not been a Code, I don't think that I would have done the stories any differently."
"Should American companies be used to create greater censorship in Islamic countries? or, might this type of activity be bordering on a form of treason?"
"As the internet became widely available to Saudi citizens, the ISU and the Saudi Telecommunications Commission (STC) began to draft rules and regulations related to governance and censorship of anti-Islamic, inappropriate, and illegal online materials."
"Islam cannot leave certain spheres of life strictly to the individual, any action which is likely to prejudice the healthy growth of Muslim society will have to be severely prohibited. We do not believe in unrestricted freedom to bring about a lowering of human standards, of spiritual values of allegiance to our common idealism. Anything which brings in germs of decay and degeneration in our physical, moral or spiritual life will have to be ruthlessly curbed and steps will have to be taken that loose talk and loose thinking are not allowed to exist. This does not mean censorship but an enlightened and sympathetic censorship with an appeal to the highest tribunal in the land."
"Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. (Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.)"
"Nazi Germany sought control over people's beliefs, not just their bodies and territory. From the 1933 state-sanctioned book burnings in Germany to the purging of libraries across Europe as nations were conquered by the Nazis, "un-German" reading material was threatened with extinction. The scale of destruction was impressive. By V-E Day, it is estimated that Germany had destroyed over 100 million books in Europe."
"On May 10, 1933, thousands of the banned books were collected in Berlin's Opera Square for an event called Feuersprüche, or "Fire Incantations." … As each book was thrown in, a student announced the reason this particular book was being "sentenced to death." The reasons were stated like criminal charges. The books of Sigmund Freud, for instance, were charged with spiritual corruption and "the exaggeration and unhealthy complication of sexuality." After reading the charge, the student threw the book into the pile while declaring, "I commit to the flames the works of Sigmund Freud!" Other charges included "Judeo-democratic tendencies"; "mutilation of the German language"; and "literary betrayal of the soldiers of the Great War." Once the pile was complete, it was drenched with gasoline and set on fire."
"It has been estimated that over 100 million books were destroyed during the Holocaust, in the twelve years from the period of Nazi dominance in Germany in 1933 up to the end of the Second World War."