" I must protest this policy, he transmitted in silence. Why shouldn't they be allowed to read their own books? Aren't we preserving these things for THEM, after all?
Old fellow, you must understand, I replied as casually as I could. […]you've been down among them yourself. You know the villainy of which they're capable. Destructive little Barbary apes for the most part, and human intelligence only makes them worse. How many libraries have you seen burned in your time?
But the mortals built the libraries too, argued Lewis[…] It takes thousands of them to create an archive of human wisdom; only one to set a torch to it. Wouldn't you have to say, then, that the work of the librarians is more typical of mortal behavior than the work of the arsonist? "
― Kage Baker , The Children of the Company (The Company, #6)