Libraries are important. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things. So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much more biased as a reader

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand. 

Everything changes when we read.

To help people  to become confident and enthusiastic readers, support literacy programs, libraries and individuals

You can’t say directly, a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. Literate people are not usually criminals.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us.

Some years back, a notion existed in our society, ‘we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words

was somehow redundant’, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words.

The simplest way to make children literate,  teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity, give them access to books, and letting them read  Libraries really are the gates to the future..

I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in the summer holidays. Librarians were Passionate and helpful.

In libraries, members are getting freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication.

You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world reading.

It is unfortunate that, around the world, we observe local authorities take initiatives to close libraries.  as an easy way to save money, without realizing that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be opened.

Our children and our grandchildren are less literate. They are fully addicted to digital culture. They are less able to navigate the world and solve problems.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries.

If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. 

You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. 

We have an obligation to tell our politicians to understand the value of reading in creating worthy citizens and demand them to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

I worry that here in the 21st-century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

        from English novelist Neil Gaiman's speech.