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"The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it."
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"Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them."
"Self-censorship is more efficient than any police. You write and say not what you really think, but what you believe is acceptable. By that process we lose those revolutionary ideas that could change society for the better."
"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature God's image but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself kills the image of God as it were in the eye."
"We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won't be Joan's [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes-so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children."
"What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship."
"I had my first amendment rights removed by a USA judge for a video that I recorded in the public sidewalk. The right to free speech and freedom of the press only partially exists in the USA."
"Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman
"People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence."
"Who are you?' the woman said at last.'Lyra Silver-''No, where d'you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this?' Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand."
"I can't bear the thought of oblivion, Asriel, she continued. 'Sooner anything than that. I used to think pain would be worse-to be tortured forever-I thought that must be worse . . . But as long as you were conscious, it would be better, wouldn't it? Better than feeling nothing, just going into the dark, everything going out forever and ever?"
"We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down."
"Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain."
"Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it."
"Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world."
"Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.But they expected nothing else: she was very young."
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