To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

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

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

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.

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.