American Librarian Quotes

Laura Bush

Melvil Dewey

Archibald MacLeish

John Shaw Billings

James H. Billington

Nella Larsen

John Cotton Dana

A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.

John Cotton Dana

I mean, how would anyone learn anything if they weren't curious? How would scientists make discoveries? — We all have the right to be different, don't we?

Annette Curtis Klause

The most wide-flung task in the universe is the exploration of the universe itself.

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.

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

Never forget that it is the spirit with which you endow your work that makes it useful or futile.

So now she and I are friends - not with benefits, but memories.

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

Knicks and dull edges are abominations, so use knives and hatchets for nothing but they were made for.

Coordinating the retreat was important too, so important that Jiaan had assigned Aram as Fasal's assistant, to be sure he didn't overlook anything important. Like the fact that they were supposed to retreat.

The good, the bad, that's just life. Let it go. There's no need to fret about the past. The question is: who are you going to share it with tomorrow?

A miracle is a single mom who works two jobs to care for her kids and still helps them with their homework at night. A miracle is a child donating all the money in their piggy bank to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. That's where you'll find the hand and face of God.

In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate. She who was revered and worshiped by early man because of her power to see the unseen will once again be the pivot—not as sex but as divine woman—about whom the next civilization will, as of old, revolve.

Elizabeth Gould Davis

In November, the smell of food is different. It is an orange smell. A squash and pumpkin smell. It tastes like cinnamon and can fill up a house in the morning, can pull everyone from bed in a fog. Food is better in November than any other time of the year.

There's nothing really difficult if you only begin - some people contemplate a task until it looms so big, it seems impossible, but I just begin and it gets done somehow. There would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder how the job was to be done.

John Shaw Billings

Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe. Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.

John Vance Cheney

I also want to encourage anyone who has been affected by hurricane Ka, uh, Karina...

Where shall we get religion? Beneath the open sky, the sphere of crystal silence surcharged with deity.. The midnight earth sends incense up, sweet with the breath of prayer -- Go out beneath the naked night and get religion there.

Sam Walter Foss

A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.

Lawrence Clark Powell

Forks are absurd, he scoffed. They insult your food. They make it think you're killing it twice.

Clare B. Dunkle

She [Irene] wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

Abstractions have a limiting, a dehumanizing, a dehydrating effect on the relation to things of the man who must live with them. The result is that we are more and more left, in our scientific society, without the means of knowledge of ourselves as we truly are or of our experience as it actually is.

Archibald MacLeish

Material that might be illegal is such a minuscule part of what is available that we have to remember — and I mean not only librarians but everybody has to remember not to let it overshadow the incredible wealth of information that is available in this medium.