“For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)”

“Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)”

“Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere of exploration, using charm, chutzpah--and her extensive network of establishment connections--to get where she wanted to go. (From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937)”

“To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”

“strange, there's so much religion in the world, but only enough to make us fight over who is right, not enough to make us love one another.”

“In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. . . .History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.”

“It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or- anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!”