God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

West’s aphorism is an uncompromising defense of intellectual freedom. By pairing book-banning with “infanticide,” she uses deliberate moral shock to argue that suppressing books is not a minor administrative act but a profound violence against cultural life: it destroys ideas at their beginning, before they can be tested, debated, or outgrown. The invocation “God forbid” frames censorship as a kind of sacrilege—an offense against the moral order—while the categorical “any book” rejects the common exception-making that justifies bans on the grounds of taste, politics, or protection. The line thus insists that a society’s maturity is measured by its willingness to confront, not erase, troubling speech.