Top 56 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Librarians

The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.

Libraries serve the information needs of all of the people in the community — not just the loudest, not just the most powerful, not even just the majority. Libraries serve everyone.

The role of a librarian is to make sense of the world of information. If that's not a qualification for superhero-dom, what is?

A love of reading encompasses the whole of life: information, knowledge, insight and understanding, pleasure; the power to think, to select, to act, to create - all of these are inherent in a love of reading.

The education of the doctor which goes on after he has his degree is, after all, the most important part of his education.

The paperless society is about as plausible as the paperless bathroom.

Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.

If information is power, why are the powerful so ill informed?

Most people don't plan to fail, they fail to plan.

Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at the world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives- for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.

A librarian is not a legal process. There is not librarian in the country unless she or he is a lawyer who is in the position to determine what he or she is looking at is indeed child pornography.

I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly.

Blocking material leads to censorship. That goes for pornography and bestiality, too. If you don't like it, don't look at it... Every time I hear someone say, I want to protect the children, I want to pull my hair out.

The most wasteful "brain drain" in America today is the drain in the kitchen sink.

If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so.

No one should ever finish a book they're not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed the book is.

Alliances are crucial to success in the political sphere. However, if we are to approach other organizations to propose alliances for the public good, we must be prepared to assert a far more important role for the library. We must clearly define what we do and establish and assert the relationship of libraries to basic democratic freedoms, to the fundamental humanistic principles that are central to our very way of life. . . .

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

it is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors - that the master is lesser than the slave.

There's nothing really difficult if you only begin - some people contemplate a task until it looms so big, it seems impossible, but I just begin and it gets done somehow. There would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder how the job was to be done.

The computer is here to stay, therefore it must be kept in its proper place as a tool and a slave, or we will become sorcerer's apprentices, with data data everywhere and not a thought to think.

Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.

The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man - the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more - is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.

I get very concerned when we start hearing people who want to convert this country into a safe place for children. I am adult. I want available what I need to see.

It is all here. You make the choice.

Walt Disney has never addressed himself to children once in his life - never. The material of his cartoons is made to reach an adult audience. This is the whole trouble. Everything is made to reach everyone, and in order to reach everyone, he must introduce the Hollywood touch. Every illustration of a girl in Disney's books looks like the Hollywood queen and every picture of the hero looks like a badly drawn Cary Grant. Obvious symbols of an adult world.

I think the number of books published by Mr. Disney has nothing to do with whether or not he is bringing literature to children. That judgment has got to be based on quality rather than quantity. It's the same old problem that continually plagues American culture. I would rather have children playing their own games out of doors in the sunlight than getting the misrepresentation of literature as given by Walt Disney.

When a librarian really believes that a book is harmful, that its content is contrary to the welfare of the community, or that it is destructive of good taste, even if those are his opinions only, he has not only the right, but also the obligation to do what he properly can to keep that book out of the hand of those whom he thinks might be injured by it.

The library profession is ... a profession that is informed, illuminated, radiated by a fierce and beautiful love of books. A love so overwhelming that it engulfs community after community and makes the culture of our time distinctive, individual, creative and truly of the spirit.

There is no reason why good books should be lowered or lessened being rewritten to meet the demands of people who are not ready or interested enough to make the effort to read.

Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist.

The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive.

To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes.

I just said, 'Well, the real people performing miracles every day are librarians,' and we all laughed ourselves off our chairs.

Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening.

Inflation is a form of hidden taxation which it is almost impossible to measure.

I've heard people ask, What's so sacred about a classic books that you can't change it for the modern child? Nothing is sacred about a classic. What makes a classic is the life that has accrued to it from generation after generation of children. Children give life to these books. Some books which you could hardly bear to read are, for children, classic.

In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.

When we want a book exactly like the one we just finished reading, what we really want is to recreate that pleasurable experience--the headlong rush to the last page, the falling into a character's life, the deeper understanding we've gotten of a place or a time, or the feeling of reading words that are put together in a way that causes us to look at the world differently. We need to start thinking about what it is about a book that draws us in, rather than what the book is about.

...congenital killers and criminals are possessed of not one but two Y chromosomes, bearing a double dose, as it were, of genetically undesirable maleness.

We know that there are children out there whose parents do not take the kind of interest in their upbringing and in their existence that we would wish, but I don't think censorship is ever the solution to any problem, be it societal or be it the kind of information or ideas that you have access to.

Material that might be illegal is such a minuscule part of what is available that we have to remember and I mean not only librarians but everybody has to remember not to let it overshadow the incredible wealth of information that is available in this medium.

I feel that anybody who addresses himself to children has a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make available to children the very best that has ever been produced and to sustain the distinction of what has been produced. Everybody in the popular entertainment field or in the popular arts has a responsibility.

If everything is made so obvious that it asks nothing of the readers, then after a while, their ability to respond is atrophied. And they grow up as young people unable to take anything from a printed page, or they become bored because they haven't discovered the nuances, the differences of opinion, the differences of approach between one author and another. Children can be trusted to skip what they don't like in a book. That's perfectly all right. But to have it all reduced to the supposedly twelve-year-old mind of the adult public is what I object to.

Men insist that they don't mind women succeeding so long as they retain their "femininity". Yet the qualities that men consider "feminine" - timidity, submissiveness, obedience, silliness, and self-debasement - are the very qualities best guaranteed to assure the defeat of even the most gifted aspirant.

Simply adored Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope: the voice of Essie, the narrator, is terrific & the last line blew me away.

You should have access to ideas and information regardless of your age. If anyone is going to limit or guide a young person, it should be the parent or guardian and only the parent or guardian.

On speaking: first, have something to say; second, say it; third, stop when you have said it; and finally give it an accurate title.

If free men refused to look at dead bodies then brave men will have died in vain.

We're caught in the pace of modern living - this emphasis on the "quick take," on the magazine that says it will take you eight minutes to read an article. It seems to me that here is a tendency that ought to be denied in part. Certain children do read in the past; they love the old language; they love the sound of words. I don't think it's good enough to say something is better because is it updated and modern.

Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.

Shera's Two Laws of Cataloging: Law #1, No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger. Law #2: No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the cataloging.

When the function of libraries is put in terms of their contributions to the community, people see their centrality. The challenge to us is to continue to help them see it in those terms to describe our larger purposes. We must assert that libraries are central to the quality of life in our society; that libraries have a direct role in preserving democratic freedoms. Free access to information and the opportunity of every individual to improve his or her mind, employment prospects, and lifestyle are fundamental rights in our society.

I have a real problem when people say, "Well I walked by and you should have seen what was on the computer screen." Well, don't look, sweetie. It's none of your business. Avert your eyes.

So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex.