"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them be your acquaintances." --Winston Churchill

"The books and papers a girl reads has much to do in forming her habits and character. If she reads the poor and the trashy books, her mental life will, of necessity, partake of the character of the poor, unwholesome food with which she feeds." --Mrs. M.A. McCurdy

"How grand a thing it is to train the mind; to awaken high and noble impulses." --Lena R. Golfin

Some quotations by Gerrit Smith, an American abolitionist, from around 1859.

"Believing as I do that 'righteousness exalts a nation,' he and he only is a patriot and a servant of his country who does righteously himself and seeks to have others do righteously." --Gerrit Smith

"There is a wide-spread revival of religion in our country. It is not Christianity if it shall allow the rich to stand aloof from the poor, and the people of one complexion to refuse to associate with the people of another." --Gerrit Smith

"The clergy's assumption of an exclusive right to teach religion makes the teachers conceited, dogmatic, arrogant, tyrannical and their hearers lazy in mind and slavish in spirit." --Gerrit Smith

"A great curse is the authority which usurps the place of reason." --Gerrit Smith

"Self-complacency goes far to promote the growth of bad morals." --Gerrit Smith