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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

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? Winston Churchill

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. Noam Chomsky

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

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. Alfred Whitney Griswold

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. John Gilmore

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. Thomas Jefferson

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. George Bernard Shaw

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. George Bernard Shaw

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. Potter Stewart

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

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

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. Oscar Wilde

If a given religion's sacred text consistently promotes peace, compassion and nonviolence

impressive

interesting

compelling

conclusive

I'm not interested in the testimonials of people who converted to a religion, not even if they used to be atheists.

Everyone has moments of weakness in which emotion overrides logic.

Biblical miracles are people raising their hands and telling something impossible to happen, and it happens.

explain what logic and evidence persuaded them

what arguments and tactics are likely to be ineffective at convincing an atheist to change their mind

the only way to make an informed choice is to have the required information.

anyone with the means and the desire to act, will act.

Humanist values are mainstream American values

We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever.

It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.

With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.

The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.