About 600 BC, King Jehoiakim destroyed Jeremiah’s scroll in a fire.

Around 250 BC Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China ordered the burning of all philosophy books and history books from states other than Qin.

Following the conversion of the Maldives to Islam in 1153, Buddhist manuscripts written by Maldivian monks were burnt or destroyed.

The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s.

Ioannis Metaxas, between 1936 and 1941, conducted an intensive burning not only of Anti-Greek literature, but even of works by Goethe, Shaw, and Freud.

The 1988 publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, prompted book burnings by political Islamists, as well as the firebombing of bookstores in the UK and America.

And in 1991, the Governor of Hunan Province in China banned Lewis’ Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, on the grounds that “animals should not use human language, and that it was disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level.”

Literature can be dangerous, because ideas matter.  We must always read with care and with caution—not every book is a good or a true one.  But never take your freedom to read for granted. 

As Russian poet Joseph Brodsky said, “There are worse crimes than burning books, one of them is not reading them.”

Have a wonderful day.