‘The library exists on the knife edge between their conflict – their disagreement. It hangs in a web of checks and balances. The library is both the tree and the apple. It offers not knowledge of good and evil but knowledge for good or evil. Of course fire could be forbidden. But one of the compromises that holds back the war – not your little one here, but the big one – is the agreement that if a civilization is not capable of keeping a book from burning then perhaps it wasn’t ready for whatever knowledge was held within.’
