Notable authors on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books:

• Francis Bacon
• Honoré de Balzac
• Giordano Bruno
• Nicolaus Copernicus
• Daniel Defoe
• René Descartes
• Denis Diderot
• Desiderius Erasmus
• Gustave Flaubert
• Galileo Galilei
• Edward Gibbon
• Thomas Hobbes
• Victor Hugo
• David Hume
• Immanuel Kant
• John Locke
• John Stuart Mill
• John Milton
• Blaise Pascal
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Jonathan Swift
• Voltaire
• Émile Zola

George Bernard Shaw said, “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”