“We may sit in our library

             and yet be in all quarters

                     of the earth”

—     John Lubbock

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

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one’s devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. 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 .

— Norman COUSINS (1915- 1990)

“… One lesson the past has to teach is that every new technology, when it applies for admission to a citadel of the intellect, has invariably received its first welcome from the librarian.

— Hugh Kenner
(Scholarly Publishing 18:17
October 1986)