Boston Public Library (Boston, Massachusetts)

"My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry."
— Books in My Life  by Robert DOWNS (1903- ) 

"The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."
— Cosmos (Carl SAGAN)

 "...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that "everything is permitted," as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it."
— "Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship" from On the Democratic Idea in America New York: Harper & Row, 1972. This essay originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1971. (Irving KRISTOL) 

"He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot."

— Anonymous, Arabic Proverb