Doris Lessing Quotes

Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

Education is freedom.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Most people associate reading with laying on the beach. They don't see that it's crucial for a democracy!

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

Books are feeders of brothels.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

My parents were lovers of books, and they raised us in a manner that viewed freedom and subversion as indispensable.

Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land as the sower sows his wheatfield.

The doors of the world are opened to people who can read.

I've read too many books to believe what I am told.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

If information and knowledge are central to democracy, they are conditions for development.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

A library implies an act of faith.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.