Public Libraries Quotes

1. "All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years."
Author: Avi Steinberg

2. "Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back."
Author: Cecil B. DeMille

3. "If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds."
Author: David McCullough

4. "I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature."
Author: Edward Bellamy

5. "Of all books printed, probably not more than half are ever read. Many are embalmed in public libraries; many go into private quarters to fill spaces; many are glanced at and put away...scarcely opened until the fire needs kindling. The most ardent book-lovers are not always the greatest readers; indeed, the rabid bibliomaniac seldom reads at all. To him books are as ducats to the miser, something to be hoarded and not employed... So pleasant it is to buy book; so tiresome to utilize them."
Author: Flora Haines Loughead

6. "As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain."
Author: Jill Abramson

7. "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."
Author: John F. Kennedy

8. "Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world."
Author: John McPhee

9. "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."
Author: Katherine Paterson

10. "And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

11. "He couldn't help thinking that all that money we were spending blowing up things and killing people so far away, making people the world over hate and fear us, would have been better spent on public education and libraries. It's hard to imagine that history won't prove him right, if it hasn't already."
Author: Mark Vonnegut

12. "There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library."
Author: Martin Lewis Perl

13. "What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship."
Author: Matthew Lesko

14. "The Poet at the Breakfast Table: My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out."
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

15. "As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books."
Author: Raymond Chandler

16. "I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure."
Author: Virginia Woolf

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