Quote of the Week Archive

I’m not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court.—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.—Henri Frederic Amiel

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.—Isaac Asimov

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.—Isaac Asimov

The free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. … One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library.—Ed Asner

I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all of the world’s cuisines, past and present, was available on request.—Luigi Barzini

The libraries’ most powerful asset is the conversation they provide—between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.—Bella Bathurst

When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.—Joan Bauer

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.—Henry Ward Beecher

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.—Saul Bellow

If your library is not “unsafe,” it probably isn't doing its job.—John Berry

Libraries are not made; they grow.—Augustine Birrell

Libraries stand for an institution that values ideas and thought. They are politically neutral and no one is arguing about them. What other existing institutions have the capacity to help strangers come together? ­Libraries are right at the top; the other is fire stations. Fire stations, however, haven’t yet discovered their convening capacity.—Peter Block

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.—Jorge Luis Borges

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

As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia. And even today, as I travel around the world, I often visit places I used to dream about because of the books I’d read. The library made a difference in my life.—Ed Bradley

The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library.—Ashleigh Brilliant

When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.—Rita Mae Brown

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.—Cicero

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.—Sandra Cisneros

The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.—Tom Clancy

The best of my education has come from the public library … my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents for an overdue book. You don’t need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.—Lesley Conger

The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books. … America’s greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.—Terence Cooke

Libraries enable the past to talk to the future.—Edward Cornish

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.—Walter Cronkite

If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities.—former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.—Marie de Sevigne

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian was a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian is in the highest sense a teacher, and a reader is a workman among his tools.—Melvil Dewey

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn’t believe this access to knowledge we have here in America.—Kirk Douglas

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.—Rita Dove

My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.—Robert Downs

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.—William Dyer

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.—Albert Einstein

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go into your library and read every book.—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.—Charles W. Eliot

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.—Shelby Foote

The richest person in the world—in fact all the riches in the world—couldn’t provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.—Malcolm Forbes

If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are its banks.—Wendell H. Ford

An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.—Stephen Fry

I’d be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer.—Bill Gates

Two forces are successfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.—Maksim Gorky

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

The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity.—Vartan Gregorian

As a general rule, librarians are a kick in the pants socially, often full of good humor, progressive, and naturally, well read. They tend to be generalists who know so much about so many things that they are quite the opposite of the boring old poops they have been made out to be. Most of them are full of life, some even full of the devil.—Bill Hall, editorial page editor, Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.—David Handler

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.—Claude Adrien Helvetius

He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge—where it is written and where it is to be found.—A.A. Hodge

I did most of my learning in the library, where I could go at my own pace. I learned that I really could be a scientist and that I could take risks that other students couldn’t because nobody had any expectations of me.—John “Jack” Horner

I often wonder what my life would be like without the use of a library. Throughout my education and career, public and private libraries have been not only the key to much of the knowledge I have acquired, but also have given me a direction within my profession. The best thing about the library is that it is available not only to me, but to everyone. It does not discriminate.—David Horowitz, Conservative Activist and Writer

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.—Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education

If someone thinks a library is just a warehouse for books, it’s because they haven’t used it.—Marion Moss Hubbard, San Diego Public Library Senior Public Information Officer

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.—Janis Ian

Every library is an arsenal.—Robert Green Ingersoll

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.—Lady Bird Johnson

A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance.—Lyndon Baines Johnson

Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors.—John F. Kennedy

I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.—Barbara Kingsolver

I did what I always do when I am in a strange place, in dreadful circumstances, without an idea in the world of what to do next. I went to the library.—Mary Kittredge

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn’t time enough to read everything I wanted to read.—Charles Kuralt

Nothing is pleasanter than exploring a library.—Walter Savage Landor

The only true equalisers in the world are books; the only treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can carry beyond the grave is wisdom.—J. A. Langford

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one—but no one at all—can tell you what to read and when and how.—Doris Lessing

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.—Clare Booth Luce

What is more important in a library than anything else—than everything else—is the fact that it exists.—Archibald MacLeish

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.—Groucho Marx

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.—Charles Medawar

It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing-school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world.—Owen Meredith

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual’s right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually. I cherish libraries.—James A. Michener

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.—Jan Morris

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this.—Toni Morrison

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.—P.J. O’Rourke

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public … Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.—Sir William Osler

What can I say? Librarians rule!—Regis Philbin

You see, I don’t believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that’s been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.—Monty Python

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.—Keith Richards

Basically I was a rebel growing up. I got kicked out of six schools. But I don’t think that it makes you less of an intellect. You know, if you ever crave knowledge, there’s always a library.—Michelle Rodriguez

In times of change, it is the learners who will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists. Libraries are for learners.—Al Rogers

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.—Carl T. Rowan

The public library has been historically a vital instrument of democracy and opportunity in the United States. … Our history has been greatly shaped by people who read their way to opportunity and achievements in public libraries.—Arthur Meier Schlesinger

The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.—Dr. Seuss

Great libraries have always looked to both the future and the past.—Laura Shapiro

Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.—Sidney Sheldon

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!—Richard Brainsley Sheridan

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.—Lemony Snicket

If we didn’t have libraries, many people thirsty for knowledge would dehydrate.—Megan Jo Tetrick, age 12

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.—Mark Twain

Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.—Voltaire

We cannot have good libraries until we first have good librarians—properly educated, professionally recognized, and fairly rewarded.—Herbert S. White

I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what I’m reading in the library.—Congressman Don Young