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.
Interpretation
The importance of libraries in fostering academic and intellectual greatness is paramount to a civilization's success.
Lawrence Clark Powell emphasizes the critical role that libraries play in the advancement of knowledge and culture within a society. He suggests that the greatness of educational institutions is intrinsically linked to the resources and knowledge available in their libraries, and when libraries lose their importance, it signifies a decline in civilization itself.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of funding for public libraries.
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.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
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?
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.
Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.
Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.
School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future.
Meek young men grow up in libraries.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.