Michael Gorman Quotes (20 Quotes)

The Hillsborough County Commission probably isn't gearing up to celebrate this, but the American Library Association kicks off its Banned Books Week on Saturday with a special effort to raise awareness of attacks on gay- and lesbian-themed books, like three on this year's 10 Most Banned ... The voices and stories of gays and lesbians cannot be silenced in our culture or on our bookshelves.

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.

ALA officials said they are battling these efforts as contrary to the nation's tradition of intellectual freedom. It all comes down to the imposition of your views on other people, ... To be honest, it seems to me to be downright un-American.

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.

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.

A student by definition doesn't know what he or she doesn't know.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The history of electronic technology has been that once a new capability emerges, someone finds ways to go around ... protections - in this case potentially avoiding payment to authors. I can't believe that, if Google were to go ahead with this, that someone, somewhere wouldn't find a way to illegally exploit it.

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.

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.

This is a project that is being done because they have the resources to do it and because people have gone overboard in their eagerness to digitize everything,

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.

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.