In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself.
The universe is not going to see someone like you again in the entire history of creation.
The library is central to our free society. It is a critical element in the free exchange of information at the heart of our democracy.
The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity.
The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit.
Dignity is not negotiable. Dignity is the honor of the family.
The library is our house of intellect, our transcendental university, with one exception: no one graduates from a library. No one possibly can, and no one should.
One of my greatest sources of pride as president of the New York Public Library is the continuance of the library's open, free, and democratic posture, the fact that we are here for Everyman, that we are indeed Everyman's university, the place where the scholar who is not college-affiliated can come and work and feel at home.
That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.
It is very important that, no matter what happens, you keep your feeling of self worth and value.
Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.
Libraries and museums are the DNA of our culture.
It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library. ... that learning, books, education have glamour, that self-improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour.
The book is here to stay. What we're doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer.
Everybody is somebody, so you don't have to introduce anybody.
