Skip to content

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word... To reject the word is to reject the human search.

— Max Lerner The Unfinished Country (1959)

Another quote →

Topics

Books

More quotes by Max Lerner

To humanize or glorify a man is one thing; to grasp his place in the history of the human spirit is quite another.

Public Journal (1945)

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

The Unfinished Country (1959)

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1939)

Life is a protracted struggle against the Adversary, who is man himself.

All Max Lerner quotes →

You may also like

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Max Lerner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.