Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
Interpretation
Books endure despite changing times and perspectives, representing lasting knowledge.
This quote emphasizes the enduring value of books and literature. While the advocates for or against books may change, and readers may come and go, the wisdom and knowledge contained in books are constant and remain relevant throughout time. Books serve as timeless vessels of understanding and culture that persist beyond individual opinions and lifespans.
In practice
During a speech about the value of education, you might say, 'As Lawrence Clark Powell once stated, books themselves need no defense.'
A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.
Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.
I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?
No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
I hate the idea that, when it comes to books and learning, hard is often seen as the opposite of fun. It's strange to me that we should be so quick to give up on a book or a math problem when we are so willing to grapple, for centuries if necessary, with a single level of Angry Birds.
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.
Because human development is the most specific and exalted mission of woman, studies in anthropology and theory of pedagogy are essential in girls' education.
My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
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