Oh Crap! – Musings of an Unperfect Mommy

Wednesday Wisdom

August 12, 2015

There are two quotes today, but they actually go together. The first one is this from Ray Bradbury:

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

The next quote came from an episode of The Waltons – The Firestorm – and it ties in nicely with the above Bradbury quote. This episode of the show is the one where John Boy was going to have excerpts of Mein Kempf in his newspaper and the outrage that ensues in the small community . Even the book burning in Germany is misconstrued by the people of Walton’s Mountain. They burned books in Germany to limit knowledge and freedom, these other folks just tossed them on the fire simply because they were German books. John-Boy recognizes one of the books in the fire – a Bible.

There is a lot in this awesome quote, and this episode remains my favorite to this day because of it.

I started this whole thing with my newspaper, I know that, but you misunderstood me. I was trying to show you what people are capable of out of fear and ignorance and hatred. You realize this kind of thing is happening all over Germany? All over Germany! And right now Germany and Walton’s Mountain are not very far apart in my mind. I read that a foreign tyrant was publishing his plans to take over the world and was carrying out those plans, and I thought you ought to have the opportunity to know about it. Just like I’d take the opportunity to tell you if there was a blight that was threatening your crops or some kind of scandal was threatening your government, because that’s freedom as far as I can see it. And if you choose not to know about it, that’s freedom too. But if you take the book and you burn this book then you can’t know about it and you’ve had your freedom taken away from you. Do you understand me? If there is anybody here who feels that this book is more dangerous in one piece than it is burned to ashes in that fire then I want you to come up here…I want you to take it out of my hands and I want you to throw it in the fire right now. Throw ‘em all in the fire.

So, there’s more I could say, but I think these two quotes speak volumes. Listen to what they are saying.

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» Wednesday Wisdom » Oh Crap! – Musings of an Unperfect Mommy

Wednesday Wisdom

August 12, 2015

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