Piret

“Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Evil men rarely convince others to their side by asking them to perform dark deeds for no good reason. They will always start with the lightest shade of gray. They so often use what seems like a good cause."

"You don't think it's possible that a little gray is what's needed, sometimes?" asked Davian.

Raleth snorted.

"No," he said severely. "Gray is the color of cowardice and ignorance and sheer laziness, Davian--never let anyone tell you otherwise. If something is not clearly right or wrong then it bears actually *figuring out* which one it is, not dismissal into some nebulous third category. If you have a basis for your morality, a foundation for it, then there will always be an answer--and if you do not, then trying to decide whether *anything* is right or wrong is an exercise in futility and irrelevance.”
― James Islington, The Light of All That Falls