Melvil Dewey Quotes

#1. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. - Melvil Dewey, 1876

John Palfrey

#2. It feels like last week, but in fact we're now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.

Tucker Elliot

#3. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

Hanne Blank

#4. To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and, above all, a great heart. And when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women.

Melvil Dewey

#5. Fuck Kerouac; he would write his own story.

Linda Collison

#6. A library's function is to give the public in the quickest and cheapest way: information, inspiration, and recreation. If a better way than the book can be found, we should use it.

Melvil Dewey

#7. The line between "police force" and "army" is narrow under the best of circumstances.

Mira Grant

#8. Dewey was obsessed with efficiency. He even changed his name from "Melville" to "Melvil" as a time-saving gesture and briefly even changed his last name to "Dui.

Alex Wright

#9. Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.

Melvil Dewey

#10. The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

Melvil Dewey

#11. 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.

Melvil Dewey

#12. I suffer from peroxide phobia. Every time I've gotten near a blond woman, something of mine has disappeared. Jobs, boyfriends ... one time an angora sweater leaped right off my body.

Rita Rudner

#13. There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve.

George MacDonald

#14. In an old time
there was a king as wise as a dictionary.

Anne Sexton

#15. The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.

Suzan-Lori Parks

#16. The librarian must be the librarian militant before he can be the librarian triumphant.

Melvil Dewey