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1 " Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back. "
― Cecil B. DeMille ,
2 " my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools. "
― Freeman Dyson , From Eros to Gaia (Science)
3 " Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book AwardsHard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin
4 " Libraries are more than community centers, just as librarians do more than answer questions you could easily ask Google. From the opening of the BPL, the first public library, to the expansion of public libraries across America through the Carnegie libraries, the library as an institution has been fundamental to the success of our democracy. Libraries provide access to the skills and knowledge necessary to fulfill our role as active citizens. Libraries also function as essential equalizing institutions in our society. For as long as a library exists in most communities, staffed with trained librarians, it remains true that individuals' access to our shared culture is not dictated by however much money they have. "
5 " I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means. "
― Haruki Murakami
6 " 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. "
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. , The Poet at the Breakfast-Table
7 " In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks. "
― Henry Rollins
8 " 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. "
― Avi Steinberg , Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian