- The Church’s attitude toward classical culture during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries was not merely one of indifference; it was one of hostility. (Thompson, Ancient Libraries, p. 41)
- The preservation of culture in western Europe, after the ancient libraries were closed, was not due to the Church. What preserved the Latin classics for us, an expert (Hall) has said, was “the efforts of pagan nobles of the theodosian epoch – the ‘anti-Christian Fronde,’ as they have been called. … .” (Ibid.)
- The continuity of ancient Greek literature was better preserved [in the Eastern Roman Empire] than was that of Latin literature in the West. In the East few of the clergy, except the monks, were actuated by a violent prejudice against classical literature because of its pagan nature and origin. (Op. cit., pp. 45, 46)
- Presence at a library school means that the student has had foresight enough to be willing to spend energy, money, and a good bit of that most precious capital time, in sitting down to draw plans for his life building as a whole instead of starting in to build by rule of thumb. (Richardson, The Beginnings of Libraries, pp. 1, 2)
- Libraries are the memory of mankind. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Tolzmann, The Memory of Mankind, p. xi)
- Without libraries there would ultimately be no history. The past – what has happened, what has been achieved, what has been experienced has all been handed down by means of libraries. (Paul Raabe,in Ibid.)
- History is the distillation of evidence surviving from the past. Where there is no evidence, there is no history. (Oscar Handlin, in Ibid.)
- [In the time of the Roman Empire] there were private libraries with 30,000 and even 60,000 rolls. (Op. cit., p. 15)
- So numerous were [the Moslem] private libraries that one writer has estimated that, as of 1200, there were more books in private hands in the Moslem world than in all libraries, public and private, of western Europe. (Michael H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World, p. 81)
- When the Khalifah ‘Umar was asked what was to be done with the great Alexandrian Library, he ordered it to be destroyed. This was done. The same Khalifah ordered the libraries of Persia also to be destroyed when Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas conquered Persia. (http://answering-islam.org.uk/Books/Pfander/Balance/p124.htm)
- The tragic events of the Second Gulf War, April-May 2003, have thrown the subject of “lost libraries” into ghastly prominence in today’s Iraq. Libraries, museums, and archaeological sites have all been terribly damaged in a still unfolding epic of appalling proportions which has been compared to the looting of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1158. (James Raven, Lost Libraries, p. 55)
- Like ourselves, the Maya wrote on paper, keeping thousands of books in which they recorded their history, genealogy, religion, and ritual; but their libraries and archives perished into dust or in the flames of their Spanish conquerors. (Linda Schele, A Forest of Kings, p. 18)
- Some [Maya literature written in their script and in Spanish] made their way into carefully guarded caches of books saved by the Maya from the great burning [by the Spanish]. (Linda Schele, A Forest of Kings, p. 74)
- They [the Spaniards] worked to destroy glyphic literacy among the Maya by burning their books and educating Maya children, when they were allowed any education at all, in Spanish and Latin only. (Linda Schele, A Forest of Kings, p. 401)
