#libra

When our forefathers drew up the constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The right, the classic right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not be suppressed. ↗

— Lee Harvey Oswald

#libra #freedom

There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. ↗

— Scott Douglas

#libraries #funny

Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time…the parties…” "What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the ‘library’?” “Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#college #colleges #funny #humor #humour

One never owns a book. It sits on your shelf in a fine edition like a piece of furniture, and you are its admiring ward until it flies off from you in a time of financial hardship. If it is a tattered paperback, she is your casual mistress you use a few times. If you have read it a hundred times then it is your wife, and a source of infinite mystery. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #libraries #ownership #funny

They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look. - on librarians ↗

— Patrick Ness

#librarians #thoughtful #inspirational

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

#libraries #thoughtful #inspirational

To all my librarian friends, champions of books, true magicians in the House of Life. Without you, this writer would be lost in the Dust. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#dedications #librarians #life

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#love

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves. ↗

— Marilyn Johnson

#men

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113 ↗

— Miles Harvey

#genius #librarian #titles #men