What an astonishing thing a book is! It's a flat object made from a tree, with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic and this room is filled with magic.
–Carl Sagan

A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance.
–President Lyndon Baines Johnson

I got my break—big break—when I was five years old and it's taken me more than seventy years to realize it. You see at five, I learned to read. It's that simple and it's that profound. I left school at thirteen, I didn't have a formal education, and I believe I would not be standing here tonight without the books, the plays, and the scripts.
–Sir Sean Connery on accepting the AFI Life Achievement Award

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
–Victor Hugo

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.
–Jacqueline Kennedy

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
–Ray Bradbury

If kids can read, you can stir their imaginations. They can educate themselves, even if they don't have the best opportunities.
–Dolly Parton

Books provide so many avenues to knowledge, to understanding, to fun and to solving problems. They help us cope with triumph and tragedy and failure. Books are the best example of human sharing I know. Read on!
–Attorney General Janet Reno

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
–Elbert Hubbard

When I was growing up reading was important. We read for entertainment and knowledge. Information is power. The more you read, the more you know and the more successful you become.
–Senator Bob Dole

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
–Jerry Seinfield

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations—something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.
–Katherine Paterson

We read to know we are not alone.
–C.S. Lewis

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
–Confucius

Some people will lie, cheat, steal and back-stab to get ahead . . . and to think, all they have to do is READ.
–Fortune

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.
–Frederick Douglass

Reading is important to me because it offers me nothing less than all the world of human thought. It is one of the great gifts and helps to balance this life.
–Tyne Daly

Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens.
–President William Jefferson Clinton on International Literacy Day, September 8th 1994

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
–Mason Cooley

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
–Samuel Johnson

Give a kid a book and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.
–Neil deGrasse Tyson

A home without books is a body without a soul.
–Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)