Quote of the Day (Doris Lessing, on Libraries and Democracy)

“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.”— British novelist and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing (1919-2013), in The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books That Inspired Them, edited by Antonia Fraser (2015)