Popular quotes about Libraries! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.
James H. BillingtonAs a shy, introverted, scholarly child (long ago) I don't know what I would have done without libraries! My family moved often. I was always the new kid in town. The library always offered me my first and most important friendship: the place where I felt right at home. I still feel that way today, about libraries.
Lois LowryIf this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all โ except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.
John F. KennedyClassroom libraries are not 25 copies of 5 books. Classroom libraries are 1000-2000 copies of different books.
Richard AllingtonHealth information is just about the number one thing that people go into public libraries and connect to public libraries for. They're also looking for information about things that can make their lives better. It's a great equalizer.
Carla HaydenOne potential long-term problem with many current digital libraries is that they grew out of and aresupported by bricks-and-mortar libraries. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement, inreality it creates a potentially dangerous situation that I call "the other digital divide."
Tom PetersAll over the world, there are libraries of a sort. They are among the most beautiful places on the earth, and they hold more information than the Library of Congress. Within these libraries are millions of books, each a uniques masterpiece to see and touch. They are teaching this language to scientists. However, so far only one percent of the books have been deciphered. Some tell how to find new medicines; others reveal new things to eat... These treasure houses of knowledge are the ancient forests of our planet.
Brock AdamsIn a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.
Anne LamottNegro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
Langston HughesI want the public as well as libraries and schools to enjoy unlimited access to public-domain books. This means no charges for these kind of texts themselves.
Tom PetersThere is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
Jacqueline WoodsonWhen I use a name or place, I want to leave the reader open to the waterfall of determinacy that it may provoke. And I don't know, but I must mention the name Borges. I try to mention it in every one of my works. It's a mark, a stamp, a sort of homage to Argentinidad. But it's an homage that works through pat phrases, those stock images that populate his work: the night, labyrinths, libraries. That is, I don't want simply to pay homage to Borges, but rather the contrary: to recall his commonplaces.
Sergio ChejfecIn tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for allโlibrarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy, and theyโre right. Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.DโฆIn tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.
Marilyn JohnsonIt may be primarily property taxes in the case of a public library, or state taxes and tuition in the case of an academic library at a public university, but the funding sources of most libraries continue to have a strong geographic component.
Tom PetersI really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?
Michael MooreToday, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Sergey BrinSolitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo EmersonI would walk into the Carnegie Library and I would see the pictures of Booker T. and pictures of Frederick Douglass and I would read. I would go into the Savannah Public Libraries in the stacks and see all of the newspapers from all over the country. Did I dream that I would be on the Supreme Court? No. But I dreamt that there was a world out there that was worth pursuing.
Clarence ThomasSchools have never been about getting access to information. That's the job of libraries. Schools and universities have nobler missions as gentle gatekeepers. Their role is to control ideas on the loose and to present the best and noblest ideas to the young.
Andrew NikiforukLibraries promote the sharing of knowledge, connecting people of all ages with valuable information resources. These dynamic and modern institutions, and the librarians who staff them, add immeasurably to our quality of life.
George W. BushLibraries have a special role to play in our knowledge economy. Your institutions have been and should be a place where parents and children come to read together and learn together. We should take our kids there more.
Barack ObamaI talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tendency to borrow instead of buy.
Paula PoundstoneI think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries.
Sandra CisnerosThe founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.
Marguerite YourcenarYou must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray BradburyIt's easy to blame the nature-deficit disorder on the kids' or the parents' back, but they also need the help of urban planners, schools, libraries and other community agents to find nature that's accessible.
Richard LouvWhat is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship.
Matthew LeskoThe library was one enormous room, with long, high metal shelves and the perfect quiet that libraries provide for anyone looking for an answer.
Daniel HandlerI find it weird that people who claim to speak for the prisoners basically want to keep them in cages all the time - and then they'll fight for better prison libraries or whatever. It's like they're missing the big picture. If I were in prison, of course I would prefer to be outside doing physical labour. It's not physical labour but prison life that kills a person. It's so bad inside that the outside jobs are often sought after. So, yeah, call them work crews and let them do it. At the same time the retributive side can feel the cons are being punished.
Peter MoskosEvery comedian is furious. Age makes me angry. I'm unhappy at not being able to open packages anymore. I'm angry that libraries have gone. I hate children on planes. I'm very shallow, so they tend to be little things. To be honest, I think I was probably angry the day I was born, you know, about diapers or something.
Joan RiversI enjoy biographies and whatnot. I'm also a fan of presidential libraries. I've visited quite a few of them, especially the more modern ones.
David MandelGoing to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.
Kehinde WileyThe free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library. I'd just browse until I found something interesting. Libraries have definitely changed my life.
Ed AsnerYes, yes, I see it all! โ an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist โ for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
Miguel de UnamunoI photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces accessible to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, as of a few years ago, zoos. All of the places have a purpose, as for the most part do the things within them.
Candida HoferTo exact of every man who writes that he should say something new, would be to reduce authors to a small number; to oblige the most fertile genius to say only what is new, would be to contract his volumes to a few pages. Yet, surely, there ought to be some bounds to repetition; libraries ought no more to be heaped for ever with the same thoughts differently expressed, than with the same books differently decorated.
Samuel JohnsonMaking money isn't the main point of business. Money is a by-product.... A new product has been found, something of use to the world. A new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines go in and you're in business. It's coincidental that people who've never seen a dime now have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their faces washed. What's wrong with an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds and movies on a Saturday night?
Humphrey Bogart