"If you didn't want them to think, you shouldn't have given them library cards."
--Getting Straight, 1970 film.
Thanks to Dalton Good for this one.Books Schooks!Life is Best Viewed Throught The Eyes Of The Books.Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.How many academic librarians does it take to change a light bulb?Bla Bla Bla Blaaaa"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated….
" Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution""Librarians always look like librarians who are trying not to look like librarians. Even librarians who try not to look like librarians look like librarians trying not to look like librarians."
-Unknown
Sent in By Bob CoxIt only takes one small spark to lite up a can of whoop assNetscape was the 4th grade bully who got carried away and picked a fight with the 5th grade bully
-Thomas DowlingAd Astra Per Aspera
"A Rough Road Leads to the Stars"This site looks best on a 22" Apple Cinema Display, as does eveything.This site looks best on my monitor at work, and pretty good at my home.The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2)Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.-- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
This Is Not A TestThe most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..." -- Isaac Asimov
"Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in
purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve
the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth." -- Harold Urey
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray,
Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right
answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."
-- James Audubon
"Put me in a room with a pad and a pencil and set me up against
a hundred people with a hundred computers. I'll outcreate every
goddamn sonofabitch in the room." -- Ray Bradbury, Wired, 10/98
"Did you know [Laura Bush is] a librarian by profession? I don't know
where she and George Bush first met, but I think we can pretty much
rule out the library... In fact, they said ... that Bush could have the
first presidential library where it's all books on tape." -- Jay Leno
"There ain't no rules around here.
We're trying to accomplish something."
-- Thomas Edison
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers.
My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. -- Flannery O'Connor
"The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted
sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there.
Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the
computer will ask, 'Specify type of goat.'" -- Jason Alexander
"'My son is a genius!' Gramma croaked suddenly.
Which is what she'd later do: croak suddenly."
-- Daniel Handler, "Watch Your Mouth"
"A poxe on him, a fellow that pretends onely to learning, buyes
titles, and nothing else of bookes in him." -- Jonson, _Epicoene_"...the post-literate society: 'of COURSE I can read,
but THANK GOD I don't have to.'" -- Tom Lehrer
"Franklin sailed a key-hung kite / and watched the storm-stung flight of it.
Everyone was much impressed / but Edison made light of it." -- James Facos
"Oh, havoc," cried Pooh, as he let slip the heffalumps of war.
I have a friend who told me that the very best computer system ever built
by mankind was by the Druids at Stonehenge. Well, that's an old story.
But what I liked was that he felt the Druids didn't die out, they just
went bankrupt trying to debug the software. -- J. Finke
"Every morning, I pick the Washington Post up off my doorstep and scream at
it, 'PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE ME'. But it hasn't worked yet..." -- John Porter"In essence, the conflict that exists today is no more than
an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to
mankind in semi-religious trappings."
- Einstein, on his dying day, April 18, 1955
The most important website in the world.I can always tell when I've been doing too much research with Google when I run across more than two purple (visited link color) links within the first twenty search results.
Cam"Do not forget. Remember and warn"
- Plaque fixed to the hollow shell of Sarajevo's National Library
"I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I'm a luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitious surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind from the computer's ramified but rigid order." - Annie Proulx
"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
-Frank Lloyd Wright "Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs."
-Christopher Morley, Inward Ho "Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people."
-André Dubus, Broken Vessels, 1991 "The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy Inaugural Address "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else." - Donald Knuth
"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave." - Thomas Jefferson
"Now, with my adolescence behind me and my daughter's still ahead, I am nearly speechless with gratitude for the endurance and goodwill of librarians in an era that discourages reading in almost incomprehensible ways." - Barbara Kingsolver "Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by packrats and vandalized nightly." - Roger Ebert"To be literate is to possess the cow of plenty." - Motto of the Madras Library Association"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass
the guilty." - Jessica Mitford "No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human
hopes than a public library." - Samuel Johnson"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned." - Saul Bellow.
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their
common sense." - Gertrude Stein"To create a new culture does not only mean to make original discoveries
on an individual basis. It also and especially means to critically
popularize already discovered truths, make them, so to speak, social,
therefore give them the consistency of basis for vital actions, make them
coordinating elements of intellectual and social relevance." - Antonio Gramsci
"O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention."
-William Shakespeare "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
-William Shakespeare "As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to
measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends." - Jeremy Bentham
"No possession can surpass, or even equal a good library, to the lover of books. Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures that never cloy." - John Alfred Landford
"My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read." - Jorge Luis Borges
"A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Information is the currency of democracy." - Thomas Jefferson"The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"During the Internet age, we've forgotten that professional librarians know how to find information better than anyone – especially better than computer programmers. Though at the beginning of the Web era in 1993, librarians did not have the computer and Web development skills to show their muscles, they do now."
John C. Dvorak"He was a librarian the way my cat is a librarian," said White, a registered Democrat who said friends in New York first told him about the ad. "I mean just because you work in a hospital, does that mean you're a doctor?"
Source"Public libraries don't have programmers on their staff developing the integrated library software. They license the software from vendors that specialize in that business."
Jerry Kuntz"The single most important activity for building the knowledge required
for eventual success is reading aloud to children."
BECOMING A NATION OF
READERS, 1984"The child that reads is the one who succeeds."He who doesn't read is no better off than he who can't
read."
Mark TwainReading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own."In the words of Dave Robicheaux, may God bless reference librarians everywhere." James Lee Burke, (Jolie Blon's Bounce)"Those librarians," says [Michael] Moore, digging happily into his pre-ordered spaghetti. "That's one terrorist group you don't want to mess with."
Lunch with... Jan Wong, Globe & Mail, May 18, 2002 You see, I don't believe that libraries should be
drab places where people sit in silence, and that's
been the main reason for our policy of employing
wild animals as librarians.
-- Monty Python, "Gorilla Librarian" sketch
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
— Quoted by J.R. Kidd in Learning and Society
Bernard Keble SANDWELL (1876-1954)If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.
— Irving STONE (1903-1989)
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
— Henry Wadsworth LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)
My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.
— Letter to George Johnson, January 1824.
Joseph HOWE
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
— Cited in Writer's Digest, February 1976, p25
Ray Douglas BRADBURY (1920- ) Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries.
— Arthur ASHE (1943-1993)Library
Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
— Light Armour. McGraw-Hill, 1954.
Richard ARMOUR "There may be nicer, smarter and better people than librarians
somewhere, but I don't know who they could be." --
Denis Horgan, _Hartford Courant_, July 17, 2002"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
---Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (Letter to Col. William F. Elkins)"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence,
There's a knob called brightness, but it doesn't work."
Eugene P. Gallagher. Data isn't information any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.
-- Clifford Stoll"Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique."
Karl Shapiro
Beyond Criticism
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
-- Oscar Wilde
"A library is thought in cold storage." - Herbert Samuel
Libraries are one of the only face-to-face services left where kids can come with no appointment and get professional services from someone with a master's degree who assigns no grades, makes no judgments. It's the greatest democratic institution ever created.
-- Patrick O'BrienWithout books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
-- Alexander Bartholini, De Libris LegendisBooks are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Without books, the development of Civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" (as the poet said) "Erected in the sea of time." They are the companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.
Books are humanity in print.
-- Barbara Tuchman"A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!" - Richard Sheridan
"If none but true and useful things were recorded, our immense historical libraries would be reduced to a very narrow compass; but we should know more and know it better." - Voltaire
"I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure." - Virginia Woolf
"Maybe I'm not the star athlete, but with a ghost story I can scare the f*** out of every kid. It's empowering." - Clive Barker
"Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass." - Japanese proverb
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statue or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
-Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
via Mefi
He who says that nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
-Rae"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved. "
Barbara Kingsolver
"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation."
Walter CronkiteYou, as librarians, stand at the door beyond which this infinity resides…As the 19th century French writer Victor Hugo said: "A library implies an act of faith." You are the keepers of that faith.
Rita Dove"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration." Andrew Carnegie"My pen is my harp and my lyre; my library is my garden and my orchard." - Judah Ha-Levy
"As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia. And even today, as I travel around the world, I often visit places I used to dream about because of the books I'd read. The library made a difference in my life." - "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley"My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid."
Rules of the Road, Putnam 1997, p. 142"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I though it might sober me up to sit in a library."
from The Great Gatsby, chapter 3"A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure."
Jennifer Patterson Nobody graduated from a library
Nobody graduated without one.
Debbi HealyThe medicine chest of the soul.
Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes. "There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends-- always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that."
NY Times 1 Apr 56
"An intelligent person is not necessarily one who knows the answers but rather knows where to find them." "When you absolutely positively have to know, ask a librarian."
John Ellison"Many of the diverse communities think of the library as a white institution. . . . It's an us-and-them mentality. There's a reluctance to go ask the white lady behind the counter."
Suburban libraries changing to reflect diversity
Books gave me the idea there was a life beyond my poor Mississippi home.
-- Oprah WinfreyMisery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but
"[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright
assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others
to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result
is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances
the progress of science and art.
-- Sandra Day O'Connor
(Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural
Telephone Service Co., 499 US 340, 349(1991)
"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
Mark Twain
"You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people
sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing
wild animals as librarians."
--Monty Python's Flying CircusEducation makes people easy to lead,
but difficult to drive; easy to govern,
but impossible to enslave.
-- Henry Peter BroughamTo be considered successful, a woman must be much better at her job than a man would have to be. Fortunately, this isn't difficult. I call architecture petrified music.
Really there is something in this:
The tone of mind produced by architecture
approaches the effect of music.
-- Johanne Goethe (1749-1832), German
philosopher, poet and writerA child on the farm sees a plane fly overhead and
dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane
sees the farmhouse and thinks of home.
-- Carl BurnsAltavista in 1995 was an astonishing achievement, not because of the hardware -- yes, that was interesting and important from a technical perspective -- but because of the mindset. "Let's go index every document in the world." And once you have that sort of mindset, you can get really far.
-- Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, in How the Wayback Machine WorksHaving a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.A person walks up the circulation desk and says, cheerfully, "I'd like a cheeseburger and fries, please."
"This is a library." Replied the circulation attendant.
The person leaned closer to the circulation attendant and whispered, "Oh. I'd like a cheeseburger and fries, please.""I really, really like librarianship. Not least because it has made me famous"
Seen on geekbait Wednesday, December 12, 2001.New! Now with more speling erors than ever!"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
-- First line of Charlotte's Web"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority,
it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."
-- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1904
twainquotes.com :)Beer is both bread and circus. <>"It is not their right to act as a moral compass for the entire
community. ... What one person finds objectionable another person
might find enlightening."
--Lisel Ulaszek, commenting on a banning of Forever, 13 Dec 2001
"Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."
-- Benjamin FranklinPeople can lose their lives in libraries.
They ought to be warned.
-- Saul Bellow
"In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle."
Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973), U.S. biographer. Adventures of a Biographer, ch. 9 (1959).
"The university is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe. It is big, complex, demanding, competitive, bureaucratic, and chronically short of money."
Phyllis Dain (b. 1930), U.S. librarian, educator, and historian. Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment, by Mary Niles Maack and Joanne Passet, “Commentary” section (1994).
"I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world’s first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander."
Alexander Smith (1830–1867), Scotland poet. “Books and Gardens,” Dreamthorp (1863)."I really miss card-catalogs. I found them more useful than
computer indexes. Primarily because I never know what's missing from
a computer index - with a card catalog, I can see that everything
indexed is making it into my search."
-A Very Defiant Duck Named Ender"Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters."
Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Eleventh Selection, New York (1993)."Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). letter, Sept. 1821, to former president James Madison."An individual man or woman, carrying to a comfortless job through clanging streets the cheapest editions of some immortal book, can mount the stairs of his secret psychic watch-tower and think the whole ant heap into invisibility." - John Cowper Powys"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause
and reflect." --Mark Twain Want to make your computer go really fast? Throw it out a window.
"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them."
-Isaac Asimov "We know that all new realities are themselves provisional, and too little for us to suffer. We defend them because we don't know anything better to do; and because, in the end, it's what we can do." - Guy Debord, 1954"A collection of good books, with a soul to it in the shape of a librarian, becomes a vitalized power among the impulses by which the world goes on to improvement." - Justin Winsor, 1878"A man’s library is a sort of harem."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882).“Books,” Society and Solitude (1870)."Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads"
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894). The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, ch. 8 (1872)."Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity…. the unique and the absurd, the wise and [the] fragments of stupidity."
-Vartan Gregorian
New Yorker 14 Apr 86"The book is here to stay. What we’re doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer."
-Vartan Gregorian, President, NY Public Library
On computerization of card catalog, Time 25 Feb 85"A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history comes to life."
-Amer Library Assn Bulletin Oct 54"The computer is only a fast idiot, it has no imagination; it cannot originate action. It is, and will remain, only a tool to man."
The ALA, On Univac computer exhibited at the 1964 NY World’s FairBooks that you may carry to the fire and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.
-Samuel Johnson, Johnsoniana. Hawkins. 197."Books cannot always please, however good;
Minds are not ever craving for their food."
-George Crabbe, The Borough. Letter xxiv. Schools."E-books are impervious to analogy."
Scott Adams."I get no respect. I was crossing the street. I got hit by a mobile library.
I was lying there in pain, screaming. The guy looked at me. He went,
'Shhhh.'"
- Rodney Dangerfield
"The Web has become more and more of an entertainment vehicle, and there's
enough information to put the libraries out of business … except for the
homeless looking for shelter. Libraries should be open all night for them."
-Rodney Dangerfield