Top 1200 Public Library Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.

We English majors...need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one...Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense?

I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

I've been in towns where there is no library, or where the library for the high school and the library for the town is one room, and it's smaller than my modest living room here. So you don't have many resources in 1950 or even 1970. This is the year, 2013, every town in America is connected to the web. Every town in America is therefore connected to all kinds of resources at the Library of Congress, at 100,000 websites.

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.

If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.

I worked in restaurants, and I worked in the Cambridge Public Library.

My parents used to park us kids at the public library in downtown Honolulu every Saturday. They'd leave us there at 8 A.M. and pick us up at 4 P.M. - so between those hours, you'd better find something to do! I sat upstairs in the picture room and went through opera, ballet, and theater books. I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes - they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn't have much of a social life.

An actress spends a lifetime observing people. You build up a mental library. No, not a library. Make that a repository.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I'll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

On my first visit to the public library, I was like a kid at a candy store where all the candy was free. I gorged myself until my tummy ached.

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

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

London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.

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.

In reality, handing over public space to private developers does not guarantee that new library spaces will be comparable in size or otherwise remain fully-functional.

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.

You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college.

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

Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal.

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

Few things would gratify me as much as a rediscovered respect for things belonging to others. Not abusing the property of others (or that of the community) is one of the ways in which we respect others. It is an essential part of being considerate guests, no matter where we are: in an airplane, in a friend's home, in a movie theater, in a doctor's office, in a public library, or in a public square.

I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career.

A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful. It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.

I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.

The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

I have a library, and it's like I want to beat Belle on 'Beauty and the Beast' and have a better library than she had.

If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.

The world is full of magical places, and the library has always been one of them for me. A library can be that special place for our children.

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.

In my day the library was a wonderful place.... We didn't have visual aids and didn't have various programs...it was a sanctuary.... So I tend to think the library should remain a center of knowledge.

The institution of a public library, containing books on education, would be well adapted for the information of teachers, many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.

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

Each time you admire the façade of the New York Public Library, you are paying homage to Western civilization.

I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn't have a similar story to mine - transformation through the public library.

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.

A library is a place where you can live a thousand lives. So why are you waiting when you could be living? Visit your library today.

The first thing my family did when we moved was join the local church. The second was to go to the library and get library cards.

I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.

In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

Television is like a library. There are a lot of library books in it, and you have to pick and choose what you take out of it.

The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

[T]he public library is where those without money, power, access, university affiliation, or advanced degrees can get information for free.

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.

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.

I was a voracious reader and the library fed my curiosity, imagination and my soul. I read by the shelf - biographies, fantasy - all and everything fed my dreams. Then as an adult whenever I would go on location the first thing we would do as a family is sign up at the closest library. Not only would we find books, but what was happening in that town, because the library is the head of the community.