“This was but a prelude;
where books are burnt
human-beings will be burnt
in the end”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Heinrich Heine photo
Heinrich Heine 61
German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic 1797–1856

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“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”

Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
Almansor: A Tragedy (1823), as translated in True Religion (2003) by Graham Ward, p. 142
Variant translations:
Wherever books are burned, men in the end will also burn.
Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people.
Where they burn books, they will also burn people.
It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people.
Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.
Where they burn books, they also burn people.
Them that begin by burning books, end by burning men.

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“The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground.”

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p. 28 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b325850;view=1up;seq=34
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“[After]
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I listened, but I could not hear
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“Razed the garden, profaned the chalices and the altars, by horse the Huns broke into the Monastic library and they tore the incomprehensible books and they vituperated them and they burnt them, fearing their symbols and characters might be concealing secret blasphemies against their God, who was an iron scimitar…”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.
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