Top 100 Bookish Quotes

We’ve been celebrating intellectual freedom for Banned Books Week here at Quotables.

This week we had an extra-special blogathon with great guest posts from our friends Anaïs, Paul, and Bailey, along with a blog round-up of all of the best Banned Books Week blog posts we could find.

Since we never underplay our enthusiasm, we’ve compiled a list of our Top 100 Bookish Quotes – from books, about books, and everything in-between.

Don’t forget to hop on over to Quotables and love your favourites!

Part 1: Banned Books

Quotes On Banning Books

1. Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.
— Heinrich Heine

2. There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
— Oscar Wilde

3. 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.
— Alfred Whitney Griswold

4. The paper burns, but the words fly away.
— Akiba ben Joseph

5. Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

6. If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
— Benjamin Franklin

7. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
— Ray Bradbury

8. Every burned book enlightens the world.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

9. The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
— Oscar Wilde

10. God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
— Rebecca West

Quotes From Banned Books

1. I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

2. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it.
— JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

3.Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

4.Oh Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly. Pray for us.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple

5. I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

6. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

7. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

8. I mean—hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you’re not any crazier than the average asshole on the street.
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

9. Some changes happen deep down inside of you. And the truth is, only you know about them. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
— Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes

10. I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering it things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Quotes On Censorship

1. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
— Voltaire

2. Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
— George Bernard Shaw

3. A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
— Laurence J. Peter

4. 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.
— Plato

5. The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
— Henry Steele Commager

6. Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.
— Potter Stewart

7. Can you imagine going around your neighborhood with a piece of paper that says, “I went into the LIBRARY and found a BOOK with a DIRTY WORD in it, and now I want it LOCKED IN THE BASEMENT and GUARDED by a WOLVERINE so that THE PRECIOUS CHILDREN do not see the WORD. Please sign my petition.”
— Maureen Johnson

8. You can cage the singer but not the song.
— Harry Belafonte

9. Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
— Unknown

10. I think the most un-American thing you can say is, ‘You can’t say that’.
— Garrison Keillor

Quotes On Libraries

1. If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
— Cicero

2. An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
— Stephen Fry

3. A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
— Daniel Dennett

4. I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.
— Ray Bradbury

5. Madam, a circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.
— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

6. In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared… to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free of them here.
— Jane Austen

7. A library is thought in cold storage.
— Lord Samuel

8. No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
— Samuel Johnson

9. What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists.
— Archibald MacLeish

10. Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too, that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.
— Jan Morris

Quotes On Education

1. The highest result of education is tolerance.
— Helen Keller

2. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
— G.K. Chesterton

3. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
— William Butler Yeats

4. My education was interrupted only by my schooling.
— Winston Churchill

5. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
— Nelson Mandela

6. The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is to be massively overeducated.
— Oscar Wilde

7. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don’t do that.
— John Taylor Gatto

8. The careers teacher told me I had a clear choice: if I didn’t end up going to university I’d end up robbing post offices.
— Dylan Moran

9. A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
— Theodore Roosevelt

10. Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.
— Leonardo Da Vinci

Part II: 50 Quotes for Book Lovers

1. People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
— Logan Pearsall Smith

2. Outside of a dog, a book is your best friend, and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
— Groucho Marx

3. Whenever you read a good book, it’s like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don’t like to read good books.
— Jack Handey

4. So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
— Roald Dahl

5. There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read.
— G.K. Chesterton

6. Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us a model of how we should always read.
— Ernest Dimnet

7. You know when you’re young, you’re growing up, they’re almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they’re kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go ‘Oh!’
— Stephen Fry

8. Good friends, good books & a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
— Mark Twain

9. Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
— Charles W. Eliot

10. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.
— Carl Sagan

11. Marianne: That’s what makes me so sad, life is so different from books.
— Jean-Luc Godard

12. A book, lying unopened, is but a bound, sleeping, innocuous little animal that will do no one any harm. Whoever does not arouse it, will not be yawned at; whoever does not poke his nose between its jaws, will not be bitten.
— Wilhelm Busch

13. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
— Franz Kafka

14. You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
— C. S. Lewis

15. Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.
— Kin Hubbard

16. A book is a machine to think with.
— I.A. Richards

17. Statler: Hm. Do you think this show is educational?
Waldorf: Yes. It’ll drive people to read books.
— Waldorf, The Muppets

18. A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

19. Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
— Bill Watterson

20. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
— Anna Quindlen

21. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books in their house, don’t sleep with them. I think that’s very important.
— John Waters

22. Reading is thinking with somebody else’s head instead of one’s own.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

23. Reading is like the sex act – done privately, and often in bed.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

24. There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

25. A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
— Robertson Davies

26. A book is a success when people who haven’t read it pretend they have.
— LA Times

27. Never lend books, noone ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books other people have lent me.
— Anatole France

28. Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.
— Wole Soyinka

29. All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
— Amy Lowell

30. Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.
— Julian Barnes

31. When I am dead, I hope it may be said: ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read’.
— Hilaire Belloc

32. Always read stuff that’ll make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
— P.J. O’Rourke

33. The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it is also full of fourth-rate readers.
— Stan Barstow

34. Choose an author as you choose a friend.
— Wentworth Dillon

35. Reading one book is like eating one crisp.
— Diane Duane

36. Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body.
— Richard Steele

37. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
— Francis Bacon

38. The good of a book lies in its being read.
— Umberto Eco

39. The book is the greatest interactive medium of all time. You can underline it, write in the margins, fold down a page, skip ahead. And you can take it anywhere.
— Michael Lynton

40. A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond a life.
— John Milton

41. No furniture so charming as books.
— Sydney Smith

42. A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.
— Martin Tupper

43. ‘Classic’. A book which people praise and don’t read.
— Mark Twain

44. What the detective story is about is not the murder but the restoration of order.
— P.D. James

45. A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
— George Borrow

46. Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
— Salman Rushdie

47. A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
— Logan Pearsall-Smith

48. The proper study of mankind is books.
— Aldous Huxley

49. I fear the man of a single book
— Saint Thomas Aquinas

50. Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.
— Jim Bishop

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