4 Quotes by James H. Billington

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

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.

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.

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.