Libraries

"Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet."

"The great British Library — an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought."

"And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'"

"There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends; always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that."

"The richest minds need not large libraries."

"The medicine chest of the soul."

"Nutrimentum spiritus."

"You receive this writing that you may know how to preserve the books which I shall deliver to you; and you shall set these in order and anoint them with oil of cedar and put them away in earthen vessels."

"Library Here is where people, One frequently finds, Lower their voices And raise their minds."

"Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed."

"Edward raises the pointer and places its tip against Alec’s forehead. “What’s the use of having a library in there if you won’t open the books, boy? What’s the good of augmented intelligence if you won’t use it?”"

"That place that does contain My books, the best companions, is to me A glorious court, where hourly I converse With the old sages and philosophers; And sometimes, for variety, I confer With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels; Calling their victories, if unjustly got, Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy, Deface their ill-placed statues."

"A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows."

"Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do."

"Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page."

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings."

"From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite). Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."

"Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification."

"I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library."

"Now, as always, I considered my library as a cool cavern or fresh, ever-growing forest into which men passed from the heat of the day and the fever of motion to refresh their limbs and bathe their minds an hour in the grass-shade illumination, in the sound of small breezes wandered out from the turning and turning of the pale soft book pages. Then, better focussed, their ideas rehung upon their frames, their flesh made easy on their bones, men might walk forth into the blast-furnace of reality, noon, mob-traffic, improbable senescence, inescapable death. I had seen thousands careen into my library starved and leave well-fed. I had watched lost people find themselves. I had known realists to dream and dreamers to come awake in this marble sanctuary where silence was a marker in each book."

"Cardiff read these words: HOPE MEMORIAL LIBRARY. And in small letters beneath that: KNOW HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE."

"Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open."

"He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad."

"All round the room my silent servants wait, My friends in every season, bright and dim."

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. "Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, nihil deerit." (Literally: If you have a garden in your library, nothing will be lacking)."

"A great library contains the diary of the human race."

"The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world."

"If humanity were to lose its libraries, not only would it be deprived of certain treasures of art, certain spiritual riches, but, more important still, it would lose its recipes for living."

"Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself."

"A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university."

"It is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning, by getting a great library."

"But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally."

"We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future."

"Books are the tools of both teacher and pupil. A library is perhaps the most important adjunct of instruction. It is open to all and is used by all. In every department of science throughout the world the keenest intellects are at work, seeking for solutions to the unending series of problems that present themselves in the physical and natural world. 'Light, more light,' said the dying philosopher, and the longing of the world is but the echo of his last faint cry. To do our duty and to give reply to the many demands made upon us requires all the light and all the experience of other minds, wheresoever they may be found."

"Public libraries are a cornerstone of democracy. They are part of the public commons, a sanctuary for the free exchange of information and ideas. But they are under threat. From book banning to government surveillance, libraries have been a target in the "war on terror.""

"“Are you a doctor?” “Better. I’m a librarian.”"

"Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads."

"The first thing naturally when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves."

"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library."

"If they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do. This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community's libraries—gone."

"If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all — except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty."

"Librarians are literary semi-precious stones, who think they are crown jewels. **Bibliothekare sind literarische Halbedelsteine, die sich für Kronjuwelen halten."

"What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard."

"What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists."

"A great public library, in its catalogue and its physical disposition of its books on shelves, is the monument of literary genres."

"Libraries, as spaces, need to continue to inspire the public to dream big and to think great thoughts. Cities, towns, and academic communities of all shapes and sizes need the free, open public spaces that libraries–and only libraries–provide."

"People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library."

"In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library."

"I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt, If one be better with them or without,— Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed, Knows the high art of what and how to read."

"'Tis well to borrow from the good and great; 'Tis wise to learn; 'tis God-like to create!"

"When you steal from a library, you steal from everyone in the world."

"My library was dukedom large enough."

"Come, and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow."

"The library is a symbol of freedom."

"They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?"

"A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge."

"Shelved around us lie The mummied authors."

"You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn’t cost you anything."

"Thou can'st not die. Here thou art more than safe Where every book is thy epitaph."

"The library of Alexandria was burnt by the Moslimin, because, according to the instructions of Omar, the Koran only was the book of books, and all knowledge not contained in it was vain and useless. The library at Tripoli was consumed by the Christians, because it contained, for the most part, nothing but the Koran, and the works written on it. At Alamut the Koran was preserved by Jowaini, and the philosophical works written against it, doomed to destruction; and at Fas, a century before, an auto da fe of theological books was held by Sultan Yakub. Had these two alone been lost, there would not be so much reason to complain; but with them, the conflagrations of Alexandria and Alamut swept away treasures of Grecian, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian philosophy."

"While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

"The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides. But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it."

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows."

"Tell me the number of libraries in a country, I will tell you how rich the country is."

"Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those."

"Cryptome is not trustworthy, and lies."

"Young: I have done architectural work for Scientologists in NYC. Also for Church of Christ Scientists, Opus Dei, Baptists, Episcopaleans, Atheists, Socialists, Black Panthers, 5 Percenters, Mafia, Muslims, Communists and so forth."

"John Young: I don't drink water. Why drink water when there is alcohol?"

"John Young: Human activity is built on tricking and being tricked. Those who don’t hoodwink are evil people up to no good. I certainly expect to be hoodwinked. I’ll do it, too."

"John Young: There are no secrets that shouldn’t be published."

"John Young to WikiLeaks: Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy."

"John Young: This redaction is some reputation-building shit and WikiLeaks is a coward for adopting this mode. They promised never to do that. And now they are doing that. And why? Because there is money in it and reputation in it, and they want to be part of the players."

"John Young: I’m a member of WikiLeaks. I’m an insider of WikiLeaks. I’m a devotee of WikiLeaks. I’m a critic of WikiLeaks. My current shtick is to pretend that I am an opponent of WikiLeaks."

"CRYPTOME: "Authorities may access these private flows illegally, through court order or both in the name of a national security state of emergency. Corporate compliance guides have become standard office manuals to instruct staff on how to cooperate with law- enforcement subpoenas that demand consumer data and metadata. What are the prospects for viable democratic practice when the private citizen is displaced from public space and reconstructed at national scale as a fictive cipher populating the government database or watch list? Your watchlisted selfie is an inherently corrupted file.""

"CRYPTOME "Nevertheless, Snowden evidently rejected more experimental modes of distribution by self-organizing multitudes in favor of what, in retrospect, appears to have turned out to be a cynical journalistic process of maximizing curatorial control over the goose named Exclusive Scoop in order to claim all her golden eggs – including full spectrum product tie-ins from publicity, celebrity, accolades and awards to movie rights and royalties. Cryptome recently obtained documents from the public record that reveal Greenwald's 2015 base salary at the non-profit The Intercept to be $490,000. This is hardly consistent with the acts of civic humility attributed to Cincinnati's.""

"We're totally untrustworthy. We may be a sting operation, we may be working for the Feds. If you trust us, you're stupid."

"Authority was the enemy. That's [my] psychological background."

"We'll put up anything that no one else wants to put up"

"My defense is, I don't know what these documents are."

"There's nothing that should be secret. Period."

"They say, 'Don't believe that, it's just standard fare. It's a ploy.' If you believe any of this, you don't understand how spies operate. They lie so much and run so many false operations and plant so many false agents. They expose their own agents so much - there's nothing you can do that they haven't already done. In fact, they hope you will do it. To muddy the waters."

"See, it's standard tradecraft in the spy world to be extremely cooperative to people who are expecting resistance. You just offer all possible help, and they just walk right into it. Did you really think I'd let you interview me, rather than me interview you? I'm plumbing your data. I've learned a lot about how Radar operates. I'm just doing the usual shit that agents do to recruit other agents."

"John Young: My mentor, Jean-Paul Sartre, said that imagination is the only thing you can trust."

"John Young: Facts are not a trustworthy source of knowledge."

"John Young: Cryptome is not an authoritative source. It’s a source of imaginatory material. Don’t trust Cryptome, we lie to you helplessly. Don’t believe anything you see there."

"John Young: Don’t send us stuff and think that we’ll protect you."

"Deborah Natsios: I think it's interesting looked at in terms of large technosystem theory, the NSA taken as a large technosystem, this operative being something of a prosthetic extension of hardware. Snowden being understood as a kind of cyborgian creature without any political intuition. There's a kind of shock now in the system, now that this piece of hardware has suddenly, you know, gone rogue. And a person of his status, his age, his youth, there seems to be an incredible bias about their having any political voice. It's a key threshold for him to have broken out of his little enclosure and committed the act of conscience. Presumably the cyborg has no conscience, they're just kind of artificially intelligenced. And that's why if he's to be a hero in the literary sense, it's based on this act of conscience argument that he's deploying."

"John Young: I don't acknowledge the power of the law."

"Gawker: In a post on Cryptome, you suggested the leak was a "wargame". Do you think that this might be an elaborate government test? Young: Well, it will certainly be used for that purpose. They're certainly watching the response to this. They not only run their own games, they watch other people's games. Some are fortuitous like this. Some are deliberate. Natsios: I like this notion of the spontaneously combusting war games scenario. It's not top-down driven, it's just erupts and you study it as a phenomenon and information emerges that wouldn't otherwise in the carefully scripted modeling scenario."

"Natsios: We are required by state laws as architects to police issues of public health, safety and welfare. This is in the name of the public good. From Cryptome's perspective, we are obliged as architects to police the police, if you will. We are obliged to dissent, as required for the public good."

"Natsios: We find that increasingly because of legal and financial pressures, institutionalized freedom of information groups become quite inflexible, not agile, not tactical enough."

"We prefer being independent agents: We prefer that agility, we prefer that daily lack of master-plan agitation, and not being limited by the annual report obligations upon freedom of information non-profits; we have no annual report."

"Young: Cryptome, aspiring to be a free public library, accepts that libraries are chock full of contaminated material, hoaxes, forgeries, propaganda."

"Young: Cypherpunk was completely different from anything that existed at the time. It was all about taking over the world by undermining institutions and authorities."

"Young: We're great advocates of plagiarism and stealing."

"Young: The reality is that there's big business in branding dissent and whistle-blowing."

"Natsios: Our collaboration started some time late in 1993. We went online in the Internet's early infancy, its seminal moments. Quite quickly we became involved in these new online environments and communities that were positioning themselves on the front line of the politics of information. John's involvement with the Cypherpunk Listserv was a transformative moment."

"Natsios:Architects are by and large engaged in a kind of ornamental politics—a telegenic, photogenic and glossy politics that is unerringly safe. They won't put their careers on the line, they won't be visited by the authorities, they won't be subpoenaed for a federal criminal trial—all of which has happened to us."

"Young: We wouldn't do this if we didn't want to piss people off."

"Young: If you watch all these hyperbolic agendas, Snowden, Wikileaks, Greenwald, they copy government. It's the same kind of hustle of the public where they pretend to be in opposition when they're in cahoots."

"@Cryptomeorg: Cryptome is a free library operated and funded by two independent scholars. Not herd corraling NGO, leak site or commercial media, maverick. (17 October 2015)"

"@Cryptomeorg: Hillary could be hit with complicity in scheduling the Bin Laden killing to re-elect Obama. (17 October 2015)"

"@Cryptomeorg: Question for Cryptome: "what do you do?" Might be glorified as counterintelligence but counter mirrors spy perfidy. (25 October 2015)"

"Michael Crowley:When I asked John Young if there was anything he wouldn't reveal on his site -- a fault in the President's Secret Service detail, for instance -- he said, "Well, I'm actually looking for that information right now.""

"Glenn Greenwald: John Young occasionally does some repellent and demented things - such as posting the home addresses of Laura Poitras, Bart Gellman and myself along with maps pointing to our homes."

"I have no idea how John figured out how to make a living," says Tony Schuman, another Urban Deadliner. "I remember times when the electricity was shut off in his apartment because he was so wrapped up in this stuff that he hadn't bothered to find paying work. We were eating rice and beans."