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Quote by Ray Bradbury

“Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.”

Quote by Ray Bradbury

Book:Fahrenheit 451
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Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a thought-provoking novel set in a future society where books are banned and firemen are employed to burn any that are found. The story follows a fireman named Guy Montag who begins to question the status quo and the role of literature in society. more

Author

Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, born on August 22, 1920, and died on June 5, 2012, was an influential American science fiction writer, playwright, and poet. His works are known for their unique imagination and profound philosophical insights, which have had a profound impact on the science fiction genre. more

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“That's what we've been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture-this firm belief that there are no secrets that won't sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was… so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don't burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet. As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences' Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section-our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and then was sent to work in Moldova's State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with "manuscripts don't burn." Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.”

MemoryBurning BooksBulgakov
Book:The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
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“You get to a place eventually. The advanced reading section in the library of living. A place where they no longer stock the story that you’re looking for in paperback. Only leather bound first editions... with no fancy art on the cover. This is where they keep the books that look like they’re about to fall apart first day off the press. This is where they keep the books that don’t mind waiting in the darkness for someone to understand them. This is where they keep the books your parents tell you not to read. I’ll say it again. This shit isn’t offered in paperback. You’re gonna need a hard cover to write the hard truths. If it doesn’t have a spine, it’s not gonna stand up for itself. You’ll know you’re getting close when the library goes from quiet to silent. You’ll know you’re getting close when every trace of humanity disappears. You’ll know you’re getting close with the titles all sound like the last chapter at the end of the book. They call this section: “These Books Are Ready To Burn.”

PoetryLibraryBanned BooksBurning Books
Author:Kalen Dion
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“I will gather up a lifetime of things unsaid, write them down, and then offer them all to be lit up for security and burned. All at once. And then I can watch the whole thing turn to ash. The whole damn thing. Light the match, and watch it burn. What a loaded bonfire that would be though, if this gets burned when I finish filling up the whole book. What a cleansing experience that will be! If flames could speak, what a story they would tell. They say that the original bonfires were the burning up of bones. Bad bones. Bad people. Enemies. Turning bones to ash. And it was the burning up of curses and all things bad as well. God knows we have had and still have enemies, and even curses. Real ones.”

EnemiesCleansingConflict ResolutionBurning BooksBonfires
Book:Mallias The Greek Gangster the story of a card cheat
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“Plato and Aristotle were comfortable in a slave society. They offered justification for oppression. They served tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind (a natural enough ideal in a slave society); they separated matter from thought; they divorced the Earth from the heavens - divisions that were to dominate Western thinking for more than twenty centuries. Plato, who believed that 'all things are full of gods,' actually used the metaphor of slavery to connect his politics with his cosmology. He is said to have urged the burning of all of the books of Democritus (he had a similar recommendation for the books of Homer), perhaps because Democritus did not acknowledge immortal souls or immortal gods or Pythagorean mysticism, or because he believed in an infinite number of worlds. Of the seventy-three books Democritus is said to have written, covering all of human knowledge, not a single work survives. All we know is from fragments, chiefly on ethics, and secondhand accounts. The same is true of almost all the other ancient Ionian scientists.”

CosmosPlatoCarl SaganBurning Books
Book:Cosmos
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