“The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.”

“Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”

“People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do.We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it's morelike entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in acountry without an army.”

“Giving, not trading or selling, is the basis of success. The most rewarding thing you can do is just to give the world something good. And ultimately you will be paid so much more for that gift than it you had tried to trade it for something else.”

“Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librariansare the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides”

“Guards are of no use in a library.Oh, how wrong he was! Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”