For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) "lighthouses erected in the sea of time." They are companions , teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.