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

— Joseph Brodsky

Misattributed

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Joseph Brodsky 17

Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature la… 1940–1996

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

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Actually a statement by Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in The Balancing Act : Mastering the Competing Demands of Leadership (1996) by Kerry Patterson, p. 437.
However, compare to the similar Bradbury quotes from 1993 (Seattle Times) and 2000 (Peoria Journal) above.
Misattributed

“The eleven volumes of this book are to be burned after they are read. There are some people in this book who are still alive and this book may anger them, so make sure the book is burned. Tsunetomo said this repeatedly.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury book Ray Bradbury

As quoted in "Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451’" http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930312&slug=1689996, interview by Misha Berson, in ', credited to "Ray Bradbury, quoted by Misha Berson in Seattle Times", in "Quotable Quotes", The Reader's Digest, Vol. 144, No. 861, January 1994, p. 25 http://books.google.com/books?output=html&id=ZqqUAAAAIAAJ&q=%22people+to+stop+reading%22#search_anchor), or an indirect reference to the re-quoting in Reader's Digest (such as: The Times Book of Quotations (Philip Howard, ed.), 2000, Times Books and HarperCollins, p. 93
Variant: We're not teaching kids to read and write and think. … There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.
As quoted in "At 80, Ray Bradbury Still Fighting the Future He Foresaw" http://www.raybradbury.com/articles_peoria.html, interview by Roger Moore, in The Peoria Journal Star (August 2000)
Context: The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”

Lev Grossman book The Magician's Land

Source: The Magician's Land

“Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

“It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) French diplomat

C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.
Reaction to the 1804 drumhead trial and execution of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, on orders of Napoleon. Actually said by either Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, legislative deputy from Meurthe (according to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) or Joseph Fouché, Napoleon's chief of police (according to John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), http://www.bartleby.com/100/758.1.html).
Misattributed

“If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible … it may be because we have not for a long time learned to read by reading them. Great books teach people not only how to read them, but how to read all other books.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

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

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Joseph Brodsky 17

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