Quotes About Libraries

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

Access to public libraries also affects how much children read.

Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?

Successful people have libraries. The rest have big screen TVs

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

At the 1894 ALA conference it was fairly well agreed that the primary goal of the public library must be to teach good citizenship. Libraries recognized that such "Americanization" could be achieved through literacy. Thus, teaching immigrants to read was not just a benefit in and of itself; literacy would also serve the interests of democracy.

A single charitable foundation started by one capitalist does more good than a world full of socialists and leftists. Think Carnegie and his libraries, or Sloan and Kettering their hospital, or Gates in Africa.

Today, 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.

Solitary 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!

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Record stores are the hippest libraries. In these tired ole days of homogenized entertainment, where so much of the art of our society is culminated, dumbed-down and mass produced, there is a shining jewel in the rise of the indy record stores. Going to a record shop for me is like a little treasure hunt no one can take you on but yourself. It's fun to look around and see the other shoppers too...totally entrenched in their own adventure, anticipating the reward of heart wrenching, soul filling, joy making music that might just be a bin or a flip away.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries

Do you really think you'd win a PR war against a bunch of committed librarians?' He thought about this, but he knew I was right. The libraries were a treasured institution and so central to everyday life that government and commerce rarely did anything that might upset them.Some say they were more powerful than the military, or, if not, they were certainly quieter. As they say: Don't mess with librarians. Only they use a stronger word than 'mess'.

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople: to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.

No libraries, no progress.

Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries.

I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

Since our online libraries are so extensive, we think we can make all the right decisions about our personal health and well-being by pushing buttons. It's not intuitive anymore. That's the internet. Before the net, we would have gone to the community or our families to see what we should do. We often feel more isolated on our own little islands because of it.

There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer

And let's not forget that internally, we are, like all dying empires, being hollowed out from the inside in terms of infrastructure. I live near Philly, I live in Princeton. The school system is shattered with closings and layoffs. Libraries are being shuttered. Head Start is being cut back. Unemployment benefits are not being extended. You know, we've reached a point of both physical and emotional exhaustion.

If somehow every volunteer vanished tomorrow, so much of this country would come to a standstill: schools, hospitals and libraries. You can't name an institution that doesn't depend on volunteers.

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

Between the poor and any appreciation for modern science stands a wall made of failed schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of science and technology to benefit other people at their [the poor's] expense.

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature.

Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

There will be natural propriety in using an eastern light for bedrooms and libraries, a western light in winter for baths and winter apartments, and a northern light for picture galleries and other places in which a steady light is needed; for that quarter of the sky grows neither light nor dark with the course of the sun, but remains steady and unshifting all day long.

Libraries are community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone equally, and the key to that treasure chest is the library card. I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.

I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.

But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came