The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.
The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.
I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
I have faith that worthy but misunderstood or ignored books can still prevail - and when they do, fewer joys are as sweet - but authors have families to support and rent to pay, and for them, I hope for acclaim in their time rather than late-in-life or posthumously.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
In every age in which books have been produced, the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius.