Norman Cousins Quotes

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.

Libraries were full of ideas-perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.

Libraries are not made, they grow.

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.

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

Vernon Reis opened the world to me through books. He taught me that while I was physically firmly planted in blue-collar Auburn, Washington in the 50s and early 60s, intellectually I could go anywhere, explore anything, and sample exciting new ideas simply by opening a book.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

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

Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

A library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.

Public libraries are the last vestige of public free space.

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.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

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

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not. Books that were used had an open, interested feel to them, even if closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order with their fellows. You felt as though the book took as much interest in you as you did in it and was willing to help when you reached for it.

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.

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

In those days, there was no money to buy books.