LIBRARY QUOTES


Many librarians perform their duties with a profound sense of responsibility supporting the foundations of democracy by ensuring free access to information.    John Schwartz

I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.    Carl Sagan

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.    Norman Cousins

A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.    Samuel Niger

I cannot live without books.    Thomas Jefferson

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

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.    Edwin P. Whipple

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

My encouragement to you is to go tomorrow to the library.    Maya Angelou

The public library is more than a repository of books. It's a mysterious, wondrous place with the power to change lives.    Elizabeth Taylor

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.    Samuel Johnson

One sure window into a person's soul is his reading list.    Mary B. W. Tabor

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research!    Albert Einstein

It's an essential fight librarians are making, an age-old fight; yours is a battle for civilization. It's a fight for our country's founding values.    Jim Hightower

The public library is the most dangerous place in town.    John Ciardi

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.    Unknown

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.    Alexander Smith

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

The dissemination of knowledge is one of the cornerstones of civilization.    John F. Budd

Democracy needs libraries. And libraries need advocates.    ALA

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

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

A good book is the best of friends.    English Proverb

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim.    Linton Weeks

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.    Mark Twain

Information is the currency of democracy.    Thomas Jefferson

If we encounter a man of great intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.    Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

When you absolutely positively have to know, ask a librarian.    John Ellison

What can I say? Librarians rule.    Regis Philbin

In schools, in neighborhoods, in the halls of academia, in legislative chambers and throughout their communities, library advocates are the voice of America's libraries.    ALA

If this book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.    Thomas Jefferson

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.    Eddie Cantor

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.    Abraham Joshua Heschel

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

Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became the courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries.    Arthur Ashe

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

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 mission.    Toni Morrison

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for 20 years, if you really wish to learn.    Leo Tolstoy

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

A good book is the best of friends.    English Proverb

Choose an author as you would a friend.    Wentworth Dillon

Your library is your portrait.    Holbrook Jackson

No furniture so charming as books.    Sydney Smith

'Classic': A book which people praise but don't read.    Mark Twain

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.    Edwin P. Whipple

In reading, as in eating, an appetite is half the feast.    Anonymous

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

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.    Virginia Woolf

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?    Lily Tomlin

The first library automation, the punch-card, was adopted for library circulation in the 1930s, invented by Herman Hollerith in 1880s.   

Libraries never let us forget who we are, for their worth stands by the knowledge they keep and save for us.    Virginia Hamilton

We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture.    ALA

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.    Jo Godwin

What’s right with America is a willingness to discuss what’s wrong with America.    Harry C. Bauer

Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library.    Laura Bush

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.    George W. Bush

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.    Voltaire

A library is an arsenal of liberty.    Unknown

Libraries are the mind and soul of their communities, and librarians are the mind and soul of the library.    ALA

One must spend time in gathering knowledge to give it out richly.    Edmund Clarence Stedman

Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.    Charles F. Kettering

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.    Leonardo da Vinci

People will not be better than the books they read.    Bishop Potter

Reading a poor book is an opportunity lost of reading a good one.    Anonymous

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.    Harold Howe

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?    James Boswell

The dissemination of knowledge is one of the cornerstones of civilization.    John F. Budd

A library is thought in cold storage.    Herbert Samuel

A library is a growing organism.    Shiyali Ramamrita

Libraries are not made; they grow.    Augustine Birrell

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.    Augustine Birrell

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.    Barbara Tuchman

My library was dukedom large enough.    William Shakespeare

Medicine for the soul.    Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes

Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul).    Inscription at Berlin Royal Library   

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.    Samuel Johnson

To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.    Marcus Tullius Cicero

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.    Barbara Kingsolver

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

A great library contains the diary of the human race.    George Mercer Dawson

I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.    Sholem Asch

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

No use going to class unless you go to the library.    Ray Bradbury

You can't have good education without good libraries, and you can't have good libraries without good staff.    ALA

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.    Richard Powers

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.    John Lubbock

The true university these days is a collection of books.    Thomas Carlyle

A home without books is a body without soul.    Marcus Tullius Cicero

My Alma mater was books, a good library...I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.    Malcolm X

I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.    Laura Bush

Why buy a book when you can join a library.    Ricky Gervais

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy.    ALA

No two persons ever read the same book.    Edmund Wilson

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

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

Intellectual freedom is the basis of our democratic system.    ALA

Libraries serve humanity.    Michael Gorman

A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.    Samuel Niger

It does not matter how many books you may have, but whether they are good or not.    Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.    Roger Ebert

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.    Rudyard Kipling

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.    Thomas Jefferson

Data isn't information any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.    Clifford Stoll

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.    Karl Shapiro

Nobody graduated from a library. Nobody graduated without one.    Debbi Healy

E-books are impervious to analogy.    Scott Adams

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.    Rita Dove

I live for books.    Thomas Jefferson

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

Libraries are not safe places, and the reason for that is there are ideas to be found.    John Bookman

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.    Joseph Addison

A book is a friend.    American proverb

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.    Lord Henry P. Brougham

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.    Mortimer J. Adler

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the Earth as the Free Public Library.    Andrew Carnegie

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.    Jim Bishop

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.    Walt Disney

Never judge a book by its movie.    J. W. Eagan

"The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul - BOOKS.    Emily Dickinson

You know the republic will survive when there is new money for libraries.    Denis Hamill

Read, read, read.    William Faulkner

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.    W. Fusselman

Read books. They are good for us.    Natalie Goldberg

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.    Warren Buffet

The newest books are those that never grown old.    George Holbrook Jackson

I’d best head to the library. Research beckons.    Rupert Giles

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested.    Francis Bacon

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.    Edmund Burke

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

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.    Ray Bradbury

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.    Joseph Brodsky

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom.    Willard Scott

No libraries, no progress.    Willard Scott

The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.    Isaac D'Israeli

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.    Isaac D'Israeli

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.    Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.    Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read in order to live.    Gustave Flaubert

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.    Tracy Chevalier

What is reading, but silent conversation.    Walter Savage Landor

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.    Harper Lee

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.    Harriet Martineau

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.    James McCosh

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.    Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.    Charles de Secondat

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.    B. F. Skinner

Reading is seeing by proxy.    Herbert Spencer

Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.    Oprah Winfrey

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.    Richard Steele

Reading -- the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.    William Styron

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.    Henry David Thoreau

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.    Erma Bombeck

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.    Steven Spielberg

Your library is your paradise.    Desiderius Erasmus

For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.    Pete Hamill

If you can read this, thank a teacher.    Anonymous

All great literature, ancient and modern, is a bridge connecting one human being to another, one spirit to another.

The quality of our life is determined by how many of those bridges we can cross.    (author unknown)

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.    Chinese Proverb

There’s nothing to match curling up with a good book when there’s a repair job to be done around the house.    Joe Ryan

Books serve to show man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.    Abraham Lincoln

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.    James Russell

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."    Helen Exley

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.    Jim Fiebig

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.    Elbert Hubbard