The title of today's post is a quote by Voltaire, and it perfectly expresses how I feel about censorship and the oppression of ideas. Human Events Online is the website for a conservative weekly newspaper that enjoys a relatively large circulation, despite the fact that it's produced by right-wing morons. These geniuses recently put together a panel of conservative "scholars" (their word, not mine) to decide which 10 books written in the 19th and 20th centuries were most "harmful". I'm not even going to try to discern what they might mean by "harmful", but their selections do interest me, nonetheless. There is a distinct pattern that emerges when reading this list. It seems as if anything that encourages free thinking has been villified. Besides the Top Ten, they also listed quite a few honorable mentions. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and a couple of Charles Darwin's books are all pretty damn dangerous (but not as dangerous as Karl Marx). That's actually Simone's picture I posted...she's a real hottie compared to just about anyone else on the list. Visit this site and make the shit your summer reading list: http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591
I part with a quote by Freud: "What progress are we making? In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
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