Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus, that means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, but if I talk about God my record won’t get played Huh?

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

Facts are stubborn things.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

Obscenity comes from grime.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

The word ‚racism‘ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‚racist.‘

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

I have seen how leaders rule by intimidation. Leaders who demonize and dehumanize entire groups of people often do so because they have nothing else to offer. And I have seen how places that stifle the voices and dismiss the potential of their citizens are diminished: how they are less vital, less hopeful, less free.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

The government of Israel doesn’t like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses – the wheelchair gives me away.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

When police or prosecutors conceal significant exculpatory or impeaching material, we hold, it is ordinarily incumbent on the state to set the record straight.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

‚Fahrenheit 451‘ postulates a lot of things I didn’t want to have happen.

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

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.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

The press is the enemy.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor – over each other.

The trouble with censors is that they worry if a girl has cleavage. They ought to worry if she hasn’t any.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.