James H. Billington Quotes

“At the root of everything lay the passionate desire of thinking people to find a simple, unifying norm for society like the law of gravity that Newton had found for nature.”

“If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.”

“Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.”

“Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.”

“Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.”

“Nicholas Turgenev in his Russia and the Russians in 1847 eloquently restated the classical enlightened arguments for constitutional monarchy; but this was the voice of an old man writing in Paris.”