Quotes About Knowledge

Books cannot be killed by fire," he declared. "People die, but books never die.

The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering.

By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory.

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.

Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.

one more piece of the bigger puzzle the library is always seeking to assemble—the looping, unending story of who we are.

In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place.

grew up in libraries

Szabo frequently preaches the gospel of the library as the people's university.

checkout machine

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something wose than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

He tugged at his hair more, and then added, "He knew Burt Reynolds and what's-her-name that he married. Debra, what's that name?" "Loni Anderson, Daddy," Debra said. She turned to me. "Harry knew them really well. He knew everything about them. He told me that Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson would get divorced way before anyone else knew.

judicial bonfires, and even household stoves." The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

air force bases, where libraries are revered.

a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.

It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books.

a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.

The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy.

cardinal sin in a library, where the commitment to findability is absolute.

She cocked her head at me. "You read and read and read and read," she said, "and then what?

In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know.