A Quote by Augustine Birrell

Personally, I am dead against the burning of books. — © Augustine Birrell
Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.
I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.
Burning books is not as grave as burning people, because books, contrary to men, are not unique and ideas are fireproof!
I don't believe in burning holy books, but I am organizing a protest. I'll be burning all my Dennis Miller VHS cassettes as a special protest. I don't want to hear the introduction 'you may have seen our next comedian on the Hannity show'.
We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.
Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.
You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?
Talk about burning books and burning bushes, I think that reading an effective novel can be like being immersed in fire and emerging as something a little different.
Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.
I cling unto the burning Æthyr like Lucifer that fell through the Abyss, and by the fury of his flight kindled the air. And I am Belial, for having seen the Rose upon thy breast, I have denied God. And I am Satan! I am Satan! I am cast out upon a burning crag! And the sea boils about the desolation thereof. And already the vultures gather, and feast upon my flesh.
The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismist, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.
What America did in Vietnam and the Congo - we feel. And as a result come these demonstrations. I am not defending the act of burning USIS books. We deplore it. But we can understand the motives of the students.
Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.
Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.
Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.
As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie.
In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.
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