"The whole value of the dime is..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of.”

“The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.”

“I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.”

“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”

“Ability without honor has no value.”

“I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.”

“Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.”

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.”

“If knowing history made you rich, librarians would be billionaires.”