Art & Creativity Quote by Rebecca West

West doesn’t merely oppose censorship; she rigs the moral scale so banning a book looks like a crime against the future. Pairing “God forbid” with “infanticide” is deliberate provocation: she borrows the language of religious taboo, then slams it into an image of deliberate killing. The effect is to make book banning feel not prudish but murderous, a violent interruption of what might grow.

The subtext is a theory of culture as reproduction. Books are not just products; they are carriers of possibility, arguments, dissent, and weirdness that haven’t had their say yet. To ban one is to decide in advance which minds get to exist in public. West’s analogy also exposes the self-flattering posture of censors. They claim to be protecting innocence, public morals, “the children.” West flips that script: the censor is the one attacking the vulnerable, destroying what can’t defend itself, erasing before it can mature.

Context matters: West lived through two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the long hangover of Victorian respectability. In the 20th century, banning books wasn’t an abstract campus debate; it was a tool used by states and movements trying to manufacture obedience. Her sentence compresses that history into a single ethical verdict. It’s not a policy critique; it’s an accusation. By refusing to treat bans as a respectable disagreement, she insists that intellectual life is a public good with stakes as high as life itself.