Source: Inaugural Lecture, Oxford, 1961, p. 27
“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.”
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Anaïs Nin 278
writer of novels, short stories, and erotica 1903–1977Related quotes

“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”
Dissenting, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Judicial opinions

What is to be Done? (1902)

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

“Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.”
The Stubborn Structure, p. 84
"Quotes"

“The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.”
Of John Campbell, as quoted by Joseph Wharton; reported in "John Campbell", Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)

Letter to The Daily Telegraph, July 8, 1941; published in The Letters of Sean O'Casey: 1910-41 (New York: Macmillan, 1975) p. 890.
Of P. G. Wodehouse's wartime broadcasts from Berlin.

Speech at Birkbeck College (20 March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 146.
1924