James Billington Quotes

#1. This is the point in the show where we say, 'Oh, what else do we have in the van that's flammable?'

Adam Savage

#2. Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.

James H. Billington

#3. My heart jumps out of its cage to see what the fuss is about. Damn thing. Always so hopeful, but my voice hides it well.

Sarah Wylie

#4. Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.

James H. Billington

#5. I'd give anything right now to go back, even just for a few moments, so I could pay more attention. Inscribe every detail of him, and of us together, onto my heart, where I could keep it safe always. Where even time couldn't erase it.

Jessi Kirby

#6. It's very difficult, I think, especially on two cellphones, to have a romantic conversation.

Rainbow Rowell

#7. [The White Rose] is relevant because it gives us an example that we can use ... They are a sign of how we should strive to be.

Ruth Hanna Sachs

#8. At the root of everything lay the passionate
desire of thinking people to find a simple, unifying norm for society like the law of gravity that Newton had found for nature.

James H. Billington

#9. Holding a patent doesn't mean you are inventive, and not holding a patent doesn't mean you are not.

Kalyan C. Kankanala

#10. The worst kind ofpain... is the one which is invisible to our near and dear ones

Hrishikesh Joshi

#11. If I become king, do I have to ask your guards and your ladies permission each time I want to touch you in my marriage bed?"
Her eyes blazed. "When you become my king, Finnikin, you can touch me whenever you want. Wherever you want.

Melina Marchetta

#12. If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.

James H. Billington

#13. All of us are crazy in one or another way.

Theodore Isaac Rubin

#14. For small business people, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family.

Tony Abbott

#15. Her eyes filled.
"He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago," she said. "It was the first one he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them."
Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#16. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Istvan Deak

#17. Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.

James H. Billington

#18. The bigger-is-better form of evangelism may have passed, .. The emerging generation has been so advertised, media-tised and oversold that the smaller, quieter and more authentic is the growing edge of their experience.

Craig Detweiler