Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.
Interpretation
Libraries serve as key starting points for lifelong learning and exploration.
In this quote, James H. Billington highlights the importance of libraries as foundational institutions for education and discovery. He compares the act of reading to an adventure, suggesting that libraries provide the essential resources and environment for individuals to embark on their unique journeys of learning, regardless of their personal or professional paths.
In practice
During a speech at a community event, one might quote this to emphasize the role of libraries in fostering learning.
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
The central dilemma in journalism is that you don't know what you don't know.
The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything this knowledge has to be highly specialized.
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education.
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