David McCullough Quotes

Children know that if they have a question about the world, the library is the place to find the answer. And someone will always be there to help them find the answer-our librarians. (A librarian's) job is an important one. Our nation runs on the fuel of information and imagination that libraries provide. And they are in charge of collecting and sharing this information in a helpful way. Librarians inform the public, and by doing so, they strengthen our great democracy.

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key -- and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.

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.

I've been talking about the centrality of libraries in our information society for a while now.

I would say the secret is to be enthusiastic about everything that comes into your life. To care, to care about people. To be excited about everything that comes close to you. I love to read. And I love to write, mostly.

Librarians are awesome; I don't care who knows it.

Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!

More people should use their library.

It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

What can I say? Librarians rule.

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom.

You can go into the Library of Congress and find information on just about anything, but that doesn't do you much good unless you know what you are looking for.

I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.

In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.

Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.

Librarians! Librarians always know how to find out things. That was their job even before the Internet.

I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

Library Science is the key to all science, just as mathematics is its language - and civilization will rise or fall, depending on how well librarians do their jobs.

That's what librarians do. They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look.

The free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library. I'd just browse until I found something interesting. Libraries have definitely changed my life.

Among the many inconsistencies which folly produces or infirmity suffers in the human mind, there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings... Those whom the appearance of virtue or the evidence of genius has tempted to a nearer knowledge of the writer, in whose performances they may be found, have indeed had frequent reason to repent their curiosity.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".

Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library.