Information Hunters Quotes

“Newly installed as Librarian of Congress in October 1939, MacLeish pondered the news from abroad with the mounting sense that time was running out, as he put it, “not like the sand in a glass, but like the blood in an opened artery.” That month, in a speech at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he spoke out on the importance of libraries in the contemporary crisis. “We will need to educate people to embrace democratic culture,” he told the gathering, “or they will have the ‘nonculture,’ the obscurantism, the superstition,”
― Kathy Peiss, Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe