"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."
— Germaine Greer

"Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?"
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

""Believe me, the library is the temple of God. Education is the most sacred religion of all.""
— Gene Simmons

"Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!"
— Charles Ogden

"Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?"
— Neil Gaiman

"Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is."
— Garrison Keillor

"In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim."
— Linton Weeks

"To Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand."
— Jane Langton

"Never argue with a librarian; they know too much."
— Carole Nelson Douglas (Cat in a Red Hot Rage)

"Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become...Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify."
— Elaine Dundy (The Dud Avocado)

"A good library will never be too neat or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

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

"When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began."
— Rita Mae Brown

"You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians."
— Graham Chapman

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education."
— Harold Howe

"If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty."
— John F. Kennedy

"I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university."
— John Jakes (Homeland)

"The humble little school library ... was a ramp to everything
in the world and beyond, everything that could be dreamed and
imagined, everything that could be known, everything that could be hoped.
"
— Lee Sherman

"Without libraries what have me? We have no past and no future."
— Ray Bradbury

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero