Top 719 Libraries And Librarians Quotes & Sayings - Page 9

In the ruling, Justice Roberts, who wrote the decision, referred to cell phones as not just phones but, quote, "cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, and diaries," unquote. Plus, he went on, best friends, lovers.

The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books.... America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

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.

Research, as the college student will come to know it, is relatively thorough investigation, primarily in libraries, of a properly limited topic, and presentation of the results of this investigation in a carefully organized and documented paper of some length.

Just this week, my husband proposed a plan for schools and libraries to develop their own plans to keep children from finding indecent material on the Internet as an alternative to a Congressional proposal that would require a federally mandated solution.

Blessed is he who invented recording! But what a pity that he was not born centuries earlier! Think only of all that we would be able to hear and therefore understand better. Oh, the unending research in libraries and museums, the readings and collations of texts, the maddening desire to know the truth!

Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none.

You come to work because the office is a resource: The office is a place where you can meet with other people, and the office has libraries of books and information on CD-ROM that might help you with your work.

Teachers and librarians can be the most effective advocates for diversifying children's and young adult books. When I speak to publishers, they're going to expect me to say that I would love to see more books by Native American authors and African-American authors and Arab-American authors. But when a teacher or librarian says this to publishers, it can have a profound effect.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from '60 to '82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.

It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

It's because of libraries that books like mine get recommended to book clubs and avid readers, who in turn pass them onto others looking to be whisked away from the world for a little while...and perhaps to learn a bit about themselves in the process.

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.

Poor people have big TV's. Rich people have big libraries.

I spent the first few years of my life in a smallish community in Queens. Back in those early days, kids could roam the streets with relatively little supervision and one place I visited frequently was the local library. This particular branch was little more than a storefront but to me it was an alternative universe where I could explore my interests and receive kind, informative answers to my questions from the wonderful librarians.

For years, we've been bludgeoned with the cliche "information is power." But information isn't power. After all, who's got the most information in your neighborhood? Librarians. And they're famous for having no power at all. And who has the most power in your community? Politicians. And they're notorious for being ill-informed.

For five hundred years, Baghdad had been a city of palaces, mosques, libraries and colleges. Its universities and hospitals were the most up-to-date in the world. Nothing now remained but heaps of rubble and a stench of decaying human flesh.

It would be hard for me to overestimate the importance of reading. Nothing can expand the mind and heart like the magic al world of books. .... Our libraries are an essential resource for our children, our communities, and our future.

Technology has such an impact on libraries in the last 20 years, and the last 10 years in particular.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

I think that we need to measure how we give dollars to libraries by need. And the communities that are poor, in my opinion, should get more because you have to do more outreach.

Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.

I do not know how wicked American millionaires are, but as I travel about and see the results of their generosity in the form of hospitals, churches, public libraries, universities, parks, recreation grounds, art museums and theatres I wonder what on earth we should do without them.

I feel sorry for kids nowadays, because in the majority of schools across the country, the arts have been eliminated from the curriculum. There's no art; there's no music. In some cases they've taken away the libraries. They don't do theater. And these are the things that speak to the human soul.

I work very hard every day not to have a lot of expectations. You just let go of the results, because a book will be on bookshelves and in libraries long after we're gone, and, in some ways, whatever happens is none of our business.

Schools have never been about getting access to information. That's the job of libraries. Schools and universities have nobler missions as gentle gatekeepers. Their role is to control ideas on the loose and to present the best and noblest ideas to the young.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

Libraries are where most of us really fall in love with books, where we can browse and choose on our own. Its really one of the first autonomous things we do, picking the books we want to read.

We took over with 'Leverage' three warehouses, and now four with 'The Librarians,' and turned them into proper sound stages with sound doors and all the lights. We now have control of four real, proper-sized sound stages. The problem is they're dark and empty half of the year because there aren't enough productions coming into Oregon.

Libraries are my passion in life. Before I became mayor (of Los Angeles), I used to sneak out here during lunchtime...and I'd go to a corner and take a book-any book almost-and read it for a while, and then feel rejuvenated.

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

The BBC's aim, along with schools, libraries and literacy groups, to involve more people in reading groups is an exciting idea and one that I hope will keep readers all over the UK exploring and sharing the wonderful world of books.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

Many years ago, when I was just about as complete a failure as one can become, I began to spend a good deal of time in libraries, looking for some answers. I found all the answers I needed in that golden vein of ore that every library has.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

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.

I write in public libraries and sometimes coffee shops. I can't write at home and gave up trying long ago. I need activity around me that I'm forced to block out. It helps me focus.

Every single day, authors read at bookstores and libraries - and coffeeshops and bars - all over the country. And these readings are amazing: you get to hear the book in the author's own voice, ask questions, and meet the writer. For free.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves.

The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of the books printed in England since the first quarter of the 17th century, it houses priceless printed texts, manuscripts, and collections.

Ordinary people have big TVs. Extraordinary people have big libraries.

We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.

You can tell a lot about your cooks' personalities by their music collection. I personally have such an eclectic collection, partly due to the combining of music libraries with girlfriends past.

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.

If, as I anticipate, a wide array of personal, portable information/communication devices becomes increasingly important and widespread for information-intensive users, it will be a major challenge for libraries to adapt their content and services to such a diverse technological environment.

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

I don't do casinos or prisons; I like to do projects that enhance the lives of everyday people, like campus buildings, libraries, museums and government buildings. That's why I love working in the public sector.

There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

Librarians are serious people, seldomgiven to idle jocularity. The reason for this, I believe, is because we are overwhelmed by the enormous number of good books waiting to be read, leaving little time for frivolity. My personal list of must-read books presents a daunting challenge; I can't even imagine the pressure our head librarian must be under.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

I was a bookworm. Every week I'd go to the library and get seven books. Remember libraries? I wonder if people still go. And I learned about everything from the library. I came from a Scottish family. Old school.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries?

I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.