BONUS | The Craziest Reasons Books Were Banned

Got a banned book at home? Send it our way — we need a lot more 👉 Address: 912 Main St. Bastrop, TX 78602 🎥 Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m02lZEbBY9E 📚 Sign up for Ryan’s free monthly reading list newsletter https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/: https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  When people hear about banned books- Book banning.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Book bans. Book banning. Book bans. Banning books.

• 0:19Ryan Holiday?

  They have this perception of what that is. They think it's going to be violent, or grotesque, or totally inappropriate, pornographic. Or they think the controversy is there for a reason, which is what people who are banning books want you to think. But in fact, most of the books that are on the banned, or the challenged, or the censored list aren't what you would think at all, which is sort of the point. So I wanted to go through some books that have been banned historically, that have been challenged recently, that show just how ridiculous book banning actually is. So Calendar of Wisdom. Tolstoy actually thought this was his best book, more important than More in Peace, or any of his novels. It was a collection of ancient wisdoms, spiritual wisdom, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Stoicism.

• 1:04Ryan Holiday?

  It was him picking a handful of passages from all the different traditions to meditate on each day. Now, you might not think that that's controversial, and it isn't controversial here in America, but it was banned by the Soviets shortly after it came out and basically lost completely until 1989. Only then was it rediscovered. Now it's become incredibly popular. I read a page of it every day. But for almost a century, that wasn't possible. And it was banned by the Soviets because it was religious. I don't know. That's the point. There's often not a great logic behind why something gets banned. But once it gets banned, it's lost. And it was lost for almost 100 years. We tend to think like, books are being banned by the right, or books are being banned by the left. But all governments for all time have banned books, and they have banned some really important things that people should read.

• 1:49Ryan Holiday?

  The Forty-Eight Laws of Power. This book is banned in the US federal prison system. A friend of mine works on death penalty cases, and he has to tell defendants not to have this book in their cell because it might get used against them in sentencing. Look, this is an unfarnished look at human nature. Power, Robert Greene is taking from Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu, and Talleyrand. It's taking from all these different experts on getting power, maintaining power, protecting yourself against power. So you can see why it might be popular with prisons. This book is also heavily shoplifted. But the point is, some books actually are banned by the federal government. Some books, they do make more or less illegal for people to have. But it is precisely the books that people are afraid of that they think are controversial,

• 2:34Ryan Holiday?

  that I would argue we need to read the most. If you're worried about other people using the ideas in this book, well, then you should probably read it so you can defend yourself against it. Although I would say, all the controversy about this book seems very silly to me. Robert is not just kind and generous, but he's a person of integrity and decency. This is a book about how the world works, not a book about how the world should work. In 2021, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, who has complained publicly about cancel culture and censorship and all that, canceled an event with the authors of this book because he disagreed with what was in it. This is, I wouldn't say revisionist history, but it's debunking of the myths around one of Texas's most celebrated icons and sort of the last stand at the Alamo,

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  which is a little more complicated than, you know, the movies, or the TV shows, or the stories you learned as a kid tell you that it is. When I teach my kids, who I'm raising in Texas, about the Alamo, I've taken them to the Alamo. I've read them stories from A Time to Stand. I've read them from Harrigan's book. I've told them the inspiring, exciting, and dramatic versions of the Alamo. And then I've also told them the truth about the Alamo because you need to hear it from all sides to get to what actually matters. You probably read The Great Gatsby in high school. Here's the 100th anniversary edition. But maybe you didn't if you live in South Carolina or Florida because they tried to ban it. They tried to ban The Great Gatsby, one of the greatest novels ever written in English. Why?

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  They thought it was vulgar. They thought it was inappropriate. It had strong language. When I heard about them trying to ban this book, I thought of that famous scene in the library in Gatsby's house, where the guy's going through the books. And he notices, this is how books used to be done, that none of the pages had been cut. Gatsby only interacted with his idea of what books were, not what was actually in them, which I think is fitting here, and unfortunately, a bit ironic. It's crazy, actually, how many classic novels, widely considered to be some of the best ever written, were banned or challenged at different points. Master and Margarita was banned by the Soviets. In fact, it was very difficult for Bogakov to ever publish it. As early as 1885, Huckleberry Finn has been banned or challenged.

• 4:48Ryan Holiday?

  We've been doing this for over 100 years with this book, arguing about the language in it, the racial stereotypes in it, even though, of course, the whole book is about pushing back against those stereotypes, against racism, which of course is also what Fahrenheit 451 is about, right? That it's not just the government trying to get transgressive books out of people's hands. The real argument that Ray Bradbury is trying to make is that it's people not wanting other people to be offended, people not liking things that offend them that leads to book banning. That's what it's actually about. And then, of course, irony of ironies. That book has been banned. That book has been challenged. People have thought that book was inappropriate and offensive, including in places like South Africa, Florida again, Irvine, California, here in Texas.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  And then, most recently, the Elizabeth County School District in Colorado wanted parents to have to sign a permission slip if they wanted their kids to read it. So like, we've been doing this a long time and missing the point for a long time. Brave New World is another book that is, of course, a classic that people have tried to ban at one time or another. And just because a book isn't banned everywhere doesn't mean they're not trying to ban it in a very specific place for ridiculous reasons. Like, last year, by order of the Secretary of Defense, the US Naval Academy was ordered to remove something like 400 books from the Naval Academy library that it thought were too woke. One of those books was I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. The idea that someone could be in charge

• 6:16Ryan Holiday?

  of a nuclear submarine, or an aircraft carrier at some point in the future, that they could fly a fighter jet, they're too fragile to read Maya Angelou, is not just ridiculous. Ridiculous on top of the ridiculousness. I was supposed to give a talk shortly after this ban was announced, and I was going to criticize that very idea. And you know what they did? They banned me from speaking there. I'm not allowed at the Naval Academy anymore because not only did they ban books, but they banned criticizing the idea of banning books. It's not always serious literature that they're coming after. Oftentimes, it's children's books, and you just realize how dumb people are. This is one of my favorite kids' books. I've read this to my kids many times. So when I saw that in Texas, they tried to ban it, I was aghast. This is I Need a New Butt. Spoiler alert, he needs a new butt because his has a crack in it.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  This one, it makes fart sounds, which is pretty awesome. So basically, the story that happened with this one was in 2022, a school principal read this book to his students. Of course, kids being kids, they started saying butt too much. Some parents got mad and complained. Then the superintendent fired him. And then he sued the school district. He spent a bunch of money on lawyers. They spent a bunch of money on lawyers. Of course, he ends up winning. He wins a bunch of money as well. It wasn't just lame and dumb, but it was expensive. So basically, everybody lost, especially the taxpayers and the kids. One of the teachers told the New York Times, I love this quote, they said, "You know, when you try to limit the books that kids can have, you limit the kind of person they can become." And that's exactly right.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what's so self-defeating about this close-mindedness, this sort of fragility, this getting offended. Like, are we really at a place as a society where we're censoring books because it has the word butt in it? Are we really trying to prevent kids from being titillated and excited about understanding the power of words? Also, like, any book that gets kids excited, they're repeating ideas in it, that's a good thing. We don't want teachers and principals to be punished for reading to kids and for getting kids to love books, to be excited about them. So anyways, that's what I think of your book banning. One of my favorite authors is Stefan Zweig. Some people know him for his book, The World of Yesterday, which is about the Europe that was lost

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  in the destruction of World War I. But he's also a great biographer. He has a book about Magellan that I like. He has a book about Marie Antoinette. He was persecuted by the Nazis. His books were banned. His books were burned. One of my favorite books is his last book that he wrote right before he committed suicide, was this book, Montaigne. And you have Zweig, who's reeling from the censorship and the close-mindedness of his time. He discovers Montaigne, the French essayist, who himself lived through the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. And you have Montaigne talking about the certainty that it takes to sentence someone to death or to ban or suppress ideas. He just talks about the intellectual hubris of that,

• 9:16Ryan Holiday?

  which I think is an important thing to keep in mind when we talk about book banning and censorship. Like, we think we know. We think we know what's appropriate. We think we know what's right or not right. And that tends not to age well. I really love this book. This one itself wasn't banned, although it did go out of print, and I've tried to buy up as much of the stock of it as possible. But many, many of Zweig's books were banned and impossible to get in Germany during the war. And now we're here in my banned book lending library, which is next to my bookstore. And the book that we have many, many copies of is Orwell's 1984. And the irony of 1984 is, of course, the Soviets had a big problem with it.

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  They had a problem with Orwell's criticism of totalitarianism, and censorship, and authoritarianism. But the irony is, not long after it was published, it was also banned by a school district in Florida for being pro-communist because Orwell was a socialist. It's an illustration of the stupidity of this, that two schools of thought, totally opposite ends of the spectrum, are censoring the same book for basically the opposite reasons. And this wasn't just something happening a long time ago. In 2024, a group of parents in Colorado got the book banned. And it was only in 2025 that a federal judge restored access to it. So this is still happening. And that is why we have this banned book lending library here in Bastrop, Texas. And if you have a favorite banned book,

• 10:43Ryan Holiday?

  we'd love for you to send it to us. You can send it to us, Main Street here in Bastrop, Texas. I'm going to put it out on the shop. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years. And you can sign up at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.