Town Hall Meetings?
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
Winston Churchill
[via Pourquoi Pas]
Sir Winston dealt with most of the best-known dictators of the Twentieth Century, and was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature, so his comments on banning and/or burning books is certainly reasoned and relevant, but I had a vision of someone more current when I read the words.