“Libraries are the kinds of places where people with different backgrounds, passions and interests can take part in a living democratic culture.”— Eric Klinenberg, nytimes.com
“Over there [the U.S.] they have set themselves the strange, incomprehensible and barbaric aim of making these gigantic, boundless libraries available, not to a guild of scholars, professors and other such specialists, but to the masses, to the crowd, to the mob!”— Vladimir Lenin, marxists.org