Quotes About Libraries

We have entered the era of the 'imperial' former presidency with lavish libraries, special staffs and benefits, around-the-clock Secret Service protection for life and other badges of privilege.

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.

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.

Boston had the first public library, Liverpool had the first lending library. Both cities have pioneered medical advancements during the decades and both have the largest economic powers in the world exactly 213 miles to the south by car.

A very important part of writing for children is appearing at book festivals, and in libraries and schools. An important part of becoming a writer for children is seeing what published writers do and say when they appear.

Everyone in the book's ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.

The resources at Harvard - its professors, our fellow students, the libraries, its alumni - created for me the opportunity to pursue my passions in finance.

I go to Amazon to browse for things I can then go find at the mall. It's like window shopping online. I want to touch the things that I buy. I am the kid who still likes actual books, bookstores, and libraries.

There's this long tradition of... even 'Where The Wild Things Are,' which many people consider the best kids' picture book of all time. It was considered revolutionary, and some libraries wouldn't carry it. But it's a classic because it taps into empowerment for kids, kids facing dangers and winning.

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

Good Lord, not again! What the devil is it with you and libraries that makes you unable to control yourself in them, James? You have always had a passion for books, but really! I fear she is right. I always have had a passion for libraries. Still, I never realised quite how much pleasure they could afford until I met you.

Libraries represent the sole contemporary American institution with the potential for making available a wide-ranging, genuinely diverse spectrum of opinions, cultural expressions, and ideas in an environment that is commercial-free and huckster-free, a commons where people can gather and select, in an un-intimidating atmosphere, whatever interests them, delights them, or even repels them--whatever they want to know about.

We're competing with everything: the beach, the mall, bookstores. Libraries are in a transition right now, caught between two forces, the old ways and technology. Libraries are under a lot of pressure to provide both.

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democrac.

Random House is definitely invested in keeping libraries healthy.

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

this series of biographies quickly turned his interests and attention from the visual arts to the vibrant intellectual life depicted in Vespasiano's pages: from paintings and statues to manuscripts and libraries. The journey through the century, with this well-connected, name-dropping bookseller as a guide, proved exhilarating. Vespasiano was, Burckhardt declared, "an authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century," 7

Ancient Rome had ultimately boasted more than twenty public libraries. They were dotted around its hills and forums, housed in temples, palaces, and porticoes, even in the baths.

You might think that people in the business of selling books would be against places where you can read books for free, but here is a secret: libraries are awesome, librarians are even *more* awesome, and both are among the greatest things civilization has given us. *No apologies; it's true.*

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) 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.

Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She could walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account of somebody else's life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential; such adventure—there's a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other ways of being.