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The following quotations about reading and books can be seen in the atrium at the Rockville Memorial Library:

My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading,
just satisfying my curiosity.
-- Malcolm X

Libraries…house our dreams.
-- Nikki Giovanni

I am a part of everything that I have read.
-- John Kieran

The more you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
-- Dr. Seuss

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Literature is my utopia.
-- Helen Keller

To read is to empower. To empower is to write. To write is to influence. To influence is to change. To change is to live.
-- Jane Evershed

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through
times of no libraries.
-- Anne Herbert

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
-- Aesop

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.
-- Frederick Douglass

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
-- Marie Curie


Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.
-- Chinese proverb

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
-- Jo Goodwin

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas,
alien philosophies and competitive values.  For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- John F. Kennedy

Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.
-- Potter Stewart

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
-- Andrew Carnegie

Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.
-- Socrates

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
-- Walter Cronkite

Knowledge is power.
-- Francis Bacon

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

We read to know we are not alone.
-- C. S. Lewis

There is a wonder in reading braille that the sighted will never know. To touch the words and have them touch you back.
-- Jim Fiebig

A library is a hospital for the mind.
-- Anonymous

Don’t join the book burners.  Do not think that you’re going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is no friend as loyal as a book.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Information is the currency of democracy.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-- Carl Sagan

Read in order to live.
-- Gustave Flaubert

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
-- Henry Ward Beecher