Censorship is unfortunately a growing problem in the modern world and the Internet age. The Internet has been fully censored by some governments and selectively by others. Books also continue to get banned. Here are some select quotes about censorship that help to explain its harmful impact on society.

Judy Blume: "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." (source)

Salman Rushdie: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." (source)

Oscar Wilde: "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."

Voltaire: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."

Isaac Asimov: "Any book worth banning is a book worth reading."

Kurt Vonnegut: "I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases." source: Banned in the U.S.A.

Ursula K. Le Guin: "A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book." (source)

Benjamin Franklin: "That if all Printers were determined not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed." (source)

George Orwell: "If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them." (source)

Ray Bradbury: "There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."

Nadine Gordimer: "Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." (source)

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Every burned book enlightens the world."

Virginia Woolf: "Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." (source)

Stephen King: "As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them." (source)

Franklink D. Roosevelt: "Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom." (source)

You can find more interesting quotes in our Quotes about Writing section.