Library Access Quotes

What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship.

T]he Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

When we build a public library, we don't have to pay to get in, but when we build a stadium, we have to pay the owner every time we go to a game.

With enough libraries, all content is free.

Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

More people should use their library.

Libraries should be open to all - except the censor. [Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]

Support your libraries... or else!

No use going to class unless you go to the library.

The fact is that our kids aren't reading books - or frankly, much of anything lately. Schools are under funded, some schools even closing their libraries. Parents have to realize that it's their job, and not the school's job, to get kids into the habit of reading for fun.

Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation's sovereignty.

Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library.

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.

The doors of this Library are open now and are all welcome. The judgment of history is left to you, the people. I have no fears of that, for we have done our best. And so I say, come and learn from it.

I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.

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.

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.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

In some families, parents don't read or don't have the money to spend on books.

I never went to college, so I went to the library.

What I would like to do is make sure every primary school child has a library card, so where parents don't get their children library cards, we'll see if we can get schools to step in and make sure that every child has one.