Quotes by Librarians Of Congress

The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.

Some are born great some achieve greatness and some hire public relations officers.

We have no choice but to be guilty God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis celebrities live off each other.

Daniel J. Boorstin

A sign of a celebrity is often that his name is worth more than his services.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

Archibald MacLeish

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

Daniel J. Boorstin

The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced.

Daniel J. Boorstin

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...

Archibald MacLeish

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

Daniel J. Boorstin

To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways..." (The Rape Of The Swan)Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.

Archibald MacLeish

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

Daniel J. Boorstin

We knock upon silence for an answering music.

Archibald MacLeish

As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief... without moral purpose or human interest.

Archibald MacLeish

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Archibald MacLeish

What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex

Archibald MacLeish

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

Daniel J. Boorstin

What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]

Archibald MacLeish

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Archibald MacLeish

A poem should not meanBut be.

Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night

Archibald MacLeish

Around, around the sun we go:The moon goes round the earth.We do not die of death:We die of vertigo.

Archibald MacLeish