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.
The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.
It is the duty of the State to educate, and the right of the people to demand education.
What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.
African American children are significantly more likely to be obese than are white children. Nearly half of African American children will develop diabetes at some point in their lives. People, that's half of our children. ...We can build our kids the best schools on earth, but if they don't have the basic nutrition they need to concentrate, they're still going to have a challenge learning.
I often say that research is a way of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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