Michael Gorman Quotations

There are times when I've been so depressed I can't see straight. At my age I should have been 80 percent in bonds. I could have had a comfortable income sitting on my duff. Instead, I had to go back to work.

I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels. They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue.

There is a failure in the core values of education. They're told to go to college in order to get a better job -- and that's okay. But the real task is to produce educated people.

It hardly seems constitutional that there is still no individualized suspicion requirement and that a recipient of a subpoena must wait a full year to challenge a gag order.

It all stems from a fearfulness of well-meaning people. We believe in parental responsibility, and that you should take care of what your children are reading. But it's not your responsibility to tell a whole class of kids what they should read.

The American Library Association (ALA) is saddened by the tragic loss of life and widespread damage to homes and communities by Hurricane Katrina, ... Libraries are an indispensable part of their communities, providing support and resources for everyone. Dozens of libraries in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama need our assistance so they, in turn, can meet the many needs of their communities.

Most libraries don't go back that far (1818). You're going to have at least four generations there.

We are troubled by what seems to be an accelerating trend in increased restrictions on access to government information.

What displaced people desperately need it is knowledge and information, and that's what public libraries do.

A lot of people were worried that challenges would go up under President Bush, but the highest numbers were during the Clinton administration, ... I think that came from resentment among conservatives that Bill Clinton was president. You had the whole thing about gays in the military. You had people who believed that somehow Clinton was not a legitimate president.

We believe in parental responsibility, and that you should take care of what your children are reading. But it's not your responsibility to tell a whole class of kids what they should read.

Individuals and communities need to be able to find high-quality, accurate information about issues that concern them, such as the health and safety of their families and communities.

If you're a freedom-to-read person, pulling a book like that one is not that different from any book that might have fake scholarship. No matter how wrong a book might be, people should have access to it. It's a slippery slope once you start removing books like that.

These are just the challenges that we've heard of, ... It's estimated that there are probably four to five times as many that we don't hear about.

It's a perpetual problem, and it attacks fundamental American liberties -- the attempt to impose one's own positions on society as a whole,

That kind of local information is unique. So putting it online and making it available to the public -- it's invaluable.

The public rewards of library enrollment speak for themselves, ... Nowhere else are books, magazines, the Web, audio- and video tapes, CDs, DVDs and more available to all people regardless of economic status.

It's appalling -- it's really astounding. Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder.