Excerpts from a beautiful speech by Carnegie Corporation1 president Vartan Gregorian to the Kansas City Club, Oct 17, 2002.
Libraries contain the heritage of humanity, the record of its triumphs and failures, its intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements and its collective memory. They are a source of knowledge, scholarship and wisdom. They are an institution, withal, where the left and the right, God and the Devil, are together classified and retained, in order to teach us what to emulate and what not to repeat.
But libraries are more than repositories of past human endeavor, they are instruments of civilization. They are a laboratory of human aspiration, a window to the future and a wellspring of action. They are a source of intellectual growth, and hope. In this land and everywhere on earth, they are a medium of progress, autonomy, empowerment, independence and self-determination. They have always provided—and I would suggest, always will provide—a place and space for imaginative recreation, for imaginative rebirth. That is because the library is a transcendent institution, being able to surpass the limitations of time and space. The library is an oasis, a place for reflection, for contemplation, for privacy, for the renewal of one’s imagination and the development of one’s mind.
1Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
