Top 565 Libraries Quotes & Sayings

As a shy, introverted, scholarly child (long ago) I don't know what I would have done without libraries! My family moved often. I was always the new kid in town. The library always offered me my first and most important friendship: the place where I felt right at home. I still feel that way today, about libraries.

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.

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.

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?

Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became 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.

Andrew Carnegie loved libraries; he knew their importance to an educated society and as anchors to our communities. And so, just as some loyal baseball fans travel to attend games at all 30 major league stadiums, over the last decade or so, I have slowly, casually, visited Carnegie libraries whenever I am on the road.

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.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all — except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.

I claim that this bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of on-line addicts; network neophytes, and library-automation insiders...Instead, I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information. The result won't be a library without books--it'll be a library without value.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.

When I became a published writer, I said, 'Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,' so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Libraries are not made, they grow.

No libraries, no progress.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.

All over the world, there are libraries of a sort. They are among the most beautiful places on the earth, and they hold more information than the Library of Congress. Within these libraries are millions of books, each a uniques masterpiece to see and touch. They are teaching this language to scientists. However, so far only one percent of the books have been deciphered. Some tell how to find new medicines; others reveal new things to eat... These treasure houses of knowledge are the ancient forests of our planet.

With enough libraries, all content is free.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

Schools across India do not have teachers, libraries, playing grounds and even toilets. I do not want to see empty classrooms, empty libraries. I do not want to see cattle grazing on fields meant to be cricket or football grounds.

It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.

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.

If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.

...I spent many, many hours in...libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were.

We like to say the Internet is the ultimate library. But libraries are libraries because people come together and fund them through taxes. Libraries actually exist, all over the country, so why is it such a reach to imagine and to someday build a public institution that has a digital aspect to it? Of course the problem is that libraries and other public services are being defunded and are under attack, so there's a bigger progressive struggle this plays into.

NC LIVE has the potential to give citizens across North Carolina immediate access to the rich array of information resources housed by the libraries on UNC's 16 campuses. It will allow unprecedented collaboration and sharing of resources among sister UNC institutions, the community colleges, and the state's public libraries.

Browsing for books with a mouse and screen is not nearly as joyful an act as wandering the stacks and getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of knowledge. The best libraries are places of imagination, education and community. The best libraries have mystery to them.

I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don't make money - they just barely break even.

Support your libraries... or else!

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.

A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children's laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.

Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.

Health information is just about the number one thing that people go into public libraries and connect to public libraries for. They're also looking for information about things that can make their lives better. It's a great equalizer.

There is something about libraries, old libraries, that makes them seem almost sacred. There's a smell of paper and must and binding stuff. It's like all the books are fighting against decay, against turning into dust, and at the same time fighting for attention.

invaders always destroy libraries.

I had a mother who walked to the library with me, and you can't walk to a lot of libraries in San Antonio because - guess what? - there are no sidewalks, except in the neighborhoods. And they're across big boulevards, and it's so hot, you can't even walk to the corner. So things like that affect how children can get to libraries. So there are a lot of things involved.

We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.

Libraries help you to dream!

Classroom libraries are not 25 copies of 5 books. Classroom libraries are 1000-2000 copies of different books.

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature.

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

Libraries are the pride of the city.

It's funny that we think of libraries as quiet demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act, sat down with noisy toddlers and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed.

Libraries are the ultimate restaurants for brain food. I sleep better knowing there are libraries. I would take a bullet for a librarian.

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.

Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.

Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.

Libraries raised me.

Libraries have always seemed like the richest places in the world to me, and I?ve done some of my best learning and thinking thanks to them. Libraries and librarians have definitely changed my life ? and the lives of countless other Americans.

Libraries are our friends.

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything.

Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.

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.

Libraries are the future of reading.

Our libraries are valuable centers of education, learning and enrichment for people of all ages. In recent years, libraries have taken on an increasingly important role. today's libraries are about much more than books.

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.

I've got libraries in my blood.

One potential long-term problem with many current digital libraries is that they grew out of and aresupported by bricks-and-mortar libraries. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement, inreality it creates a potentially dangerous situation that I call "the other digital divide."

Libraries are where it all begins.