censorship

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored.

Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. People used to say they like to read books about romance, true crime, comedy, horror or science fiction. But these days people simply say they like to read "Young Adult" books. As if that were a topic. But that's the thing: Young Adult is not a topic, it's a level of censorship. Saying "I like Young Adult books" is just another way of saying "I like books that have been dumbed down for children. I like books with no big words and no difficult abstract concepts. Nothing that will strain my brain." People like to brag that they used to start reading at an early age, as if that were a badge of honor, a sign of intelligence. Nobody brags about when they started to watch TV. But books are being dumbed down so much these days, it's really not a sign of great intelligence when you're a grown up and you struggle your way through Green Eggs and Ham.

Too many adults wish to 'protect' teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.

Pretty soon all of us will be issued with hand scanners. That way when we met another person, whether we know them or not we can scan their ID cards. That way we will know whether to smile, frown, grimace, talk, walk away, laugh, shake their hand, give them a kiss, have a coffee with them, invite them over to your house, do business with them, have sex, go to a football game, have drinks or dinner together. I'm glad that our lives are getting so organized for us, because I would have to hate to make my own decisions concerning my own life.

You're sad but you hold everything back...

You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time.

If the partridge didn't call at the wrong moment, Neither the hunter nor the falcon would know of it. It follows from this point also, That everyone's voice betrays him.

Silence might be a shout for the truth. It might be the speech that someday, in its truest, most uncontaminated, unadulterated state, all will be revealed.

Even in societies where words are often strictly controlled, messages diverse never die. Resembling seeds scattered here and there, they find all manner of cracks and crevices to root.

Word-banning seems to be a trend of late. It's become fashionable to try to ban words we're uncomfortable with, which you really can't do in the first place. You can no more ban a word than you can ban the air. In fact, language is a lot like air _ ban it all you want, it's still there.

The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

AND where did the books go when the world turned against them? When the flames of wrath blackened their pages and erased the words, they fled to find solace and redemption in the dark places of the world.__hey were exiled into darkness so their own light might one day return to illuminate the world. They went underground, literally and metaphorically, so that their haven became the hidden places far beneath the feet of their persecutors.__hus was born the Incunabula: it was forged by fire and persecution, to preserve and protect until the book might rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of demise.

The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the false view of the world presented in cheap novels will never find refuge again.

I want all the books on the she

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.