A. J. Liebling Quotes

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing

With the Internet, information is knowledge and knowledge is freedom.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.

Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved.

Why was it librarians had such a prim image? With all the information available in books right there at their fingertips, librarians could be the best-informed people around. About anything.

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect.

If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

The library is central to our free society. It is a critical element in the free exchange of information at the heart of our democracy.

Go anywhere you wish, talk to everyone. Ask any questions; you will be given answers. When you want to learn, you will be taught. Use the library. Open any book.

Libraries really are the gates to the future.

Literacy is the door to knowledge, essential to individual self-esteem and empowerment. Books, in all forms, play an essential role here.

Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary... But to survive, we must learn.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there's no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive.

The rules are now clear: no one is going to inform you, but it's easier than ever to inform yourself.

Man needs knowledge in order to survive, and only reason can achieve it; men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason, can exist only as parasites on the thinking of others.

Well, what we know Is not what they tell us We're not ignorant, I mean it, And they just cannot touch us Through the powers of the Most-High We keep on surfacin' Thru the powers of the Most-High We keep on survivin'.

I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do. It doesn't matter if you're reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.

If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are its banks.