Marilyn Johnson quotes:

Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.

Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. The would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.

Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help. They want to help us. They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything.

Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them!

We are all living history, and it's hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing's certain, though: if we throw it away, it's gone.

In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.

Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves.

Members of the Order take vows of literacy, obstinancy and bibliomancy. Bibliomancy? It's defined for us a little further down: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.

There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.

This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.

We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.