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The bargaining unit representing the Librarians of
The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library


Library Quotes to Inspire Letter-Writing
Compiled by Rich Peters

  • The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
    --Carl Sagan in Cosmos

  • A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
    --Henry Ward Beecher

  • A great library contains the diary of the human race.
    --George Mercer Dawson (1849-1901), Address on Opening the Birmingham Free Library

  • My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.
    --Kirk Douglas (1916- )

  • I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
    --Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

  • A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
    --James Madison

  • I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
    --Isaac Asimov, in I, Asimov. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

  • If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
    --Warren Buffett (1930-____) U.S. business executive in Washington Post.

  • Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
    --Lady Bird Johnson

  • Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
    --Barbara Tuchman

  • Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book.
    --Dwight D. Eisenhower

  • No matter what you do, libraries are going to have to fight for their very existence. That means you are going to need your most valuable asset on your side: library users. Your communities will have to fight for you and with you. If that's going to happen, your users have to know in their bones that there is no comparison between a chain of book superstores, or an Internet café, and a genuine community library. They have to feel your "public-ness" - which is about much more than whether or not your funding comes from the state and whether your services are free. It's about that ephemeral quality that gives a community a sense of collective ownership over a space. You know what it takes much better than I: An ongoing, never-ending conversation between the library and the community it serves.
    --Naomi Klein. Librarianship as a Revolutionary Choice. Address to the American Library Association, June 24, 2003, as reprinted on Library Juice, http://www.libr.org/Juice/issues/vol6/LJ_6.16.htm

  • After all, libraries are a critical component in the quality-of-life equation. Vibrant libraries make for vibrant communities, and, in turn, help to attract and retain upwardly mobile families and the businesses that rely on them. If the state’s local libraries are allowed to close or crumble, that will be one more strike against a state already beleaguered by a brain-drain problem.
    --"Vibrant libraries make for vibrant communities." Editorial, The Daily Item [Susquehanna Valley, PA], July 20, 2004. http://www.dailyitem.com/archive/2004/0720/edit/edit.htm

  • In hard times, libraries are more important than ever. Human beings need what books give them better than any other medium. Since ancient nights around prehistoric campfires, we have needed myth. And heroes. And moral tales. And information about the world beyond the nearest mountains or oceans. Today, with books and movies more expensive than ever, and television entertainment in free fall to the lowest level of stupidity, free circulating books are an absolute necessity. They are quite simply another kind of food. We imagine, and the we live. For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
    --Pete Hamill. "Libraries Face Sad Chapter." New York Daily News, February 25, 2002

  • Information isn't power. Who's got the most information in your neighborhood? Librarians, and they're famous for having no power at all. Who has the most power in your community? Politicians, of course. And they're notorious for being ill-informed.
    --Clifford Stoll, High Tech Heretic.

  • The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.
    --Carl Rowan

  • Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
    --Ray Bradbury

  • Libraries are community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone equally, and the key to that treasure chest is the library card. I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.
    --First Lady Laura Bush

  • Children know that if they have a question about the world, the library is the place to find the answer. And someone will always be there to help them find the answer--our librarians. (A librarian's) job is an important one. Our nation runs on the fuel of information and imagination that libraries provide. And they are in charge of collecting and sharing this information in a helpful way. Librarians inform the public, and by doing so, they strengthen our great democracy.
    --First Lady Laura Bush

  • When we build a public library, we don't have to pay to get in, but when we build a stadium, we have to pay the owner every time we go to a game.
    --Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura

  • The public library is more than a repository of books. It's a mysterious, wonderous place with the power to change lives.
    --Chicago Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor

  • There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
    • --Andrew Carnegie

  • 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. The public library is a great equalizer.
    --Musician Keith Richards

  • What libraries give you is all three tenses -- the past tense -- the present tense in which we live and the future that we can only imagine. These places have teachers who are living and dead and we are lucky to have them. If I sit here and read Artistole, he is speaking to me across a thousand years -- more than a thousand years. That sense that I am in the company of the great greatest people who ever lived is a humbling experience but a liberating experience.
    --Columnist Pete Hamill, New York Daily News

  • Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say "touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you."
    --Author Toni Morrison

  • Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
    --Walter Cronkite

  • There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
    --Ray Bradbury

  • The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
    --Author E. L. Doctorow

  • An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
    --Benjamin Franklin

  • Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
    --Thomas Jefferson

  • One gets thrilled and frightened at the same time in the presence of a library because it reminds one about one's past,present, and, most, of the possibilities of the future.
    --Bill Moyers, World of Ideas

  • Libraries are one of the only face-to-face services left where kids can come with no appointment and get professional services from someone with a master's degree who assigns no grades, makes no judgments. It's the greatest democratic institution ever created.
    --Patrick O'Brien (quoted in "Outlook: Will Libraries Survive?" CQ Researcher)

  • It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith. To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a nation must believe in three things:
    It must believe in the past.
    It must believe in the future.
    It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."
    --Franklin D. Roosevelt (Remarks at the dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, June 30, 1941.)

  • The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.
    --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  • The library is perhaps the best antidote to the insidious influence of the suburban shopping mall. As responsible citizens, we need to give the young a chance to choose between a video arcade and a reading place, a chance to browse in a marketplace of ideas instead of a marketplace of goods and services.
    --Sonny Yap

For additional quotes, see: