LIBRARY QUOTES II
quotations about libraries
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
JO GODWIN
attributed, The Librarian's Book of Quotes
That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers.
BEAUMONT & FLETCHER
The Elder Brother
Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2013
Libraries are about the only free public spaces left in our society where you're not a consumer, pressured to buy something.
SANDRA SINGH
"There's A Good Reason Canadians Won't Give Up Their Libraries", Huffington Post, June 6, 2016
I remember those days so clearly. My sister and I burrowing into shelves as though we were mining for gold, dreaming about the kind of life that we wanted to lead, the jobs we wanted to do, the kind of people that we wanted to be. Each book was so much more than the paper it was printed on; they were doors, possible pathways into our future, and by just being there in the library, we had all the keys.
POLLY HO-YEN
"The internet and coffee shops are no replacement for libraries", The Guardian, June 10, 2016
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Commencement Address at Dartmouth College, 1953
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
FRANK ZAPPA
attributed, College Is for Suckers
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
CICERO
ad familiares
Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library; a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
In Praise of Books: A Vade Mecum for Book-lovers
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
ISAAC ASIMOV
I. Asimov: A Memoir
The main function of a library is the collection and preservation of knowledge for its dissemination to all.
R. S. KHOCHAR
Modern Cataloguing
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditation and accurate enquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue, and preserved only to increase the pomp of learning, without considering how many hours have been wasted in vain endeavours, how often imagination has anticipated the praises of futurity, how many statues have risen to the eye of vanity, how many ideal converts have elevated zeal, how often wit has exulted in the eternal infamy of his antagonists, and dogmatism has delighted in the gradual advances of his authority, the immutability of his decrees, and the perpetuity of his power.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The Rambler, Mar. 23, 1751
The smell of the library was always the same -- the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup."
PETER ACKROYD
Chatterton
Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.
JOHN JAKES
Homeland
A library is the door to many lives.
SHARON CREECH
NYLA Bulletin, October/November 2001
The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
NICHOLSON BAKER
New Yorker, Apr. 4, 1994
We have this image that libraries are about nouns but they are about verbs. So, it's not books. It is reading. Every day and every way libraries are throwing pebbles and we don't know what that pebble is going to do but there is a ripple effect.
STEPHAN ABRAM
"Libraries need to embrace change to remain vital", Guelph Today, June 12, 2016
A library is much more than books. A library needs to have room for people.
SUE DOWDELL
"Request revives talks of new library", My Citizen's News, May 28, 2016