Augustine Birrell Quotes

The health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future can be tested by how well we support out libraries.

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.

Organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible whatever the consequences

In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself.

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

Support your public library! It is a treasure and a legacy that will provide entertainment, information, a sense of community, and real continuity from one generation to the next, and the next after that. So long as we keep reading, and reading to our children, there will be hope for our shared cultural heritage and the future of our world.

Libraries: Here is where people, one frequently finds, lower their voices, and raise their minds.

The richest person in the world - in fact. All the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be.

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.

If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

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

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.

Libraries are our friends.

My alma mater was books, a good library.

Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age.

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.

Libraries are community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone equally, and the key to that treasure chest is the library card. I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.

I am a public library

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral - it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.