Books are still challenged and banned in the United States and around the world. Books lke Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" are still among the most frequently challenged books, but other books have been repressed on political, social, or sexual grounds.

Some books have been challenged or banned because they appear to be "obscene" or objectionable. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" was cited as being "too sensual" and "immoral." Read more about famous banned classics!

• Banned Classics
• Banned Plays
• About Madame Bovary

Here are a few quotes:

"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
- Henry Steele Commager

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
- Sigmund Freud, 1933

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."
- Alfred Whitney Griswold, "New York Times," 1959

"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," 1859

"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," 1859

"Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them."
- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

"We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard."
- Voltaire, "Dictionnaire Philosophique," 1764

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."
- Walt Whitman

Why are books banned, when they allow us to explore differing points of view?