Dan Stutzbach’s blog

“Through these doors walk ordinary people to do extraordinary things.”

— Samuel Walton

“That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

— Margaret Mead

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

— Edward Abbey

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

— Booker T. Washington

“The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of the rich men in the country.”

— John Adams

“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don’t ever piss one off.”

— Spider Robinson (The Callahan Touch. Ace, 1993, p. 64)

“Most people don’t realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn’t value its librarians doesn’t value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?”

— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman. Line spoken by Lucien, Librarian of the Dreaming)

“Show me a computer expert that gives a damn, and I’ll show you a librarian.”

— Patricia Wilson Berger (Chicago Tribune article, 29 June 1990, Tempo section, p. 1)

“In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

— Carl Sagan

“I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where the drilling is easy.”

— Albert Einstein

“We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

— Dave Clark