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

Cicero

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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

- Cicero

Norman Cousins

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The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

- Norman Cousins

Finley Peter Dunne

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Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf. Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th' shelf is th' main thing.

- Finley Peter Dunne

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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A man's library is a sort of harem.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Malcolm S. Forbes

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The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.

- Malcolm S. Forbes

Germaine Greer

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Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

- Germaine Greer

Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

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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, Sr. Holmes

Lady Bird Johnson

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

- Lady Bird Johnson

Samuel Johnson

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No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

- Samuel Johnson

Barbara Kingsolver

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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

- Barbara Kingsolver

Charles Lamb

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What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

- Charles Lamb

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

John Lubbock

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We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

- John Lubbock

Archibald MacLeish

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What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.

- Archibald MacLeish

Tom Masson

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There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out.

- Tom Masson

Carl Sagan

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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