While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost.

No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized, cruelly mocked, but it an never be taken away unless it is surrendered.

Librarians and archivists and teachers are the Fort Knox of memory, history, and truth. We must defend them with everything we’ve got.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.

But there is no reason to doubt that it will continue as a vital and uniquely American institutional participant in the everlasting search of civilized society for the proper balance between liberty and authority, between the state and the individual.

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.