Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)
“Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence.”
As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"
1910s
Context: Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
George Bernard Shaw 413
Irish playwright 1856–1950Related quotes
4 Burr. Part IV., 2379.
Dissenting in Millar v Taylor (1769)

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 22

Letter to James Warren (4 November 1775) http://books.google.com/books?vid=LCCN04018620&id=GVjNVKLxYtgC&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=%22who+had+not+before+lost+the+feeling+of+moral+obligations+in+his+private+connections%22, reprinted in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, vol. III (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), p. 236

Federalist No. 10
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)
The Power of the Spirit (1898), edited by Andrew Murray, further edited by Dave Hunt (1971) Ch. 6 : The Church : A Habitation of the Spirit.

“Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”
Speeches of Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1952), p. 99