[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

Beware of charisma . . . Representative Men; was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1850 phrase for the great men in a democracy . . . Is there some common quality among these Representative Men who have been most successful as our leaders? I call it the need to be authentic-or, as our dictionaries tell us, conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance or belief. While the charismatic has an uncanny outside source of strength, the authentic is strong because he is what he seems to be.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.