Top 57 Quotes About Public Libraries
#1. A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.
Robert Reich
#2. In my view, investing in public libraries is an investment in the nation's future.
Bill Gates
#4. All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.
Avi Steinberg
#5. Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries.
Peter Porter
#6. my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.
Freeman Dyson
#7. I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.
Haruki Murakami
#8. I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
Virginia Woolf
#9. As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
Raymond Chandler
#10. When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.
Allan Gurganus
#12. There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.
Martin Lewis Perl
#13. If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society.
Clyde Brion Davis
#14. What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship.
Matthew Lesko
#15. I do not know how wicked American millionaires are, but as I travel about and see the results of their generosity in the form of hospitals, churches, public libraries, universities, parks, recreation grounds, art museums and theatres I wonder what on earth we should do without them.
William Lyon Phelps
#16. In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.
George Weah
#17. Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.
James A. Michener
#18. Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none.
Julie Andrews
#19. Boys like him didn't die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries.
Maggie Stiefvater
#20. Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.
Cecil B. DeMille
#21. In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks.
Henry Rollins
#22. As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain.
Jill Abramson
#23. The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books ... America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.
Terence Cooke
#24. If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.
David McCullough
#25. Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
Russell Banks
#26. I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.
David McCullough
#27. My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#28. I don't do casinos or prisons; I like to do projects that enhance the lives of everyday people, like campus buildings, libraries, museums and government buildings. That's why I love working in the public sector.
Philip Freelon
#29. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
John Ruskin
#30. Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
#31. Defending the library service from the predations of ideologically-motivated public schoolboys who had immensely privileged childhoods isn't 'whining,' it is the pursuit of passionately held beliefs.
Alan Gibson
#32. It is a great tool of dictators and tyrants, who want to get masses of people to do what they want, to make sure there are no libraries...The fact that there was no public library in Rwanda is one reason why genocide was possible.
Stephen Kinzer
#33. Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.
Jerzy Kosinski
#34. One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..
Bell Hooks
#35. This is an extremely foolish and stupid and idiotic kind of attitude - to expect theatres to make money. Do the public schools make money? Do libraries make money? Does the zoo make money? D o the sewers make money? It's a community service.
John Hirsch
#36. Libraries offer, for free, the wisdom of the ages
and sages
and, simply put, there's something for everyone inside.
Laura Bush
#37. I find it incredible and outrageous that public and school libraries are being forced to close - we'll all pay the price in the long term.
Anthony Browne
#38. Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries.
Arthur Ashe
#39. Our culture's tolerance wears thin when religion intrudes on the public discourse ... Our schools, courtrooms, and libraries set the tone for the entire society. The message they currently communicate is harsh and unambiguous: religion is offensive and should be kept out of public view.
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#40. My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
David Mamet
#41. Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Thomas Jefferson
#42. Libraries have a PR problem - or at least that's what they call it when no one under the age of 40 walks through the door. To bring in a younger crowd, the paper pushers have turned to tech to bring in the public. DVDs, CDs and, yes, even videogames are hitting the shelves of your local library.
Rob Manuel
#43. I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.
[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]
Patrick Ness
#44. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?
Fran Lebowitz
#45. Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.
Stephen Greenblatt
#46. In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries.
Joseph-Arthur De Gobineau
#47. Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.
Ali Smith
#48. A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.
[Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894]
Mark Twain
#49. By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will.
Adam Weishaupt
#50. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead ...
Marguerite Yourcenar
#51. Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.
Francis Spufford
#52. I want to know how the hell you managed to locate that hideout using the damn public library.
Richard Castle
#53. When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.
Keith Richards
#54. I will protect your tax money! It won't be spent on Prime Minister and Governor houses. InshALLAH the day PTI government comes in power these walls of governor houses will be brought down. We will break these walls and make libraries and playgrounds for the public to use
Imran Khan
#55. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
#56. The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.
Josh Hanagarne
#57. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
Zadie Smith
