Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quoteShare via Email Print this Page Daily Quotes Archives2005-09-14 Sep 14, 2005Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom.~ A. Whitney GriswoldTo limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves.~ Claude-Adrien HelvetiusAll of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf -- that book I abhor -- then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.~ Katherine Patterson Sep 13, 2005I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes.~ Andrew CarnegieFor books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them; they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.~ John MiltonI have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.~ Thomas Jefferson Sep 12, 2005To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.~ Virginia WoolfIf librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.~ Graceanne A. DecandidoI have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.~ Jorge Luis Borges Sep 9, 2005Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others.~ Felix AdlerIt is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.~ Friedrich August von HayekMorality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.~ Friedrich Nietzsche Sep 8, 2005Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.~ Dwight D. EisenhowerDuring the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power...~ Edward Alsworth RossAbsolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.~ Eric Hoffer Previous week's quotes Next week's quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print