Aaron Swartz Quotes

In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.

I was a librarian.

A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children's laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.

I take every opportunity I can to speak to librarians.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has liberally provided a way in which every town may have a collection of books free to all. So successfully has the enactment been carried out that only three per cent of the State’s population is unprovided with a free public library, and this remnant will soon be favored with its public stock of standard books.

Librarians in America do something like a couple of billion dollars worth of book business every year.

I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

I've been talking about the centrality of libraries in our information society for a while now.

I talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tendency to borrow instead of buy.

When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I'm afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.

I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere's a research library and I can't get an elitist kick from it any more.

I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.

Librarians are awesome; I don't care who knows it.

More people should use their library.

Support your libraries... or else!

What can I say? Librarians rule.

I'm a librarian, not an oracle.

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.

[Librarians] study their field with as much determination and as much delight as open-heart surgeons.

County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that's the problem. I don't know how to spell it and I'm not allowed to say it. Could you just rattle off all the swear words you know and I'll stop you when...Hello?

Library Science is the key to all science, just as mathematics is its language - and civilization will rise or fall, depending on how well librarians do their jobs.

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.' Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?' That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.

Let the influx of money be ever so great, if there be no confidence, property will sink in value... The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.