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As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
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Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Known
Crowd
Easiest
Cannot
Crowds
Acquired
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Rule
Dictator
Limits
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Craft
Untaught
Century
Centuries
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Reading
Limit
Illiterate

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Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
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Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
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As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
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A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.
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Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
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We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
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Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.
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In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
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Digestion of words as well I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
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If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
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Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.
Alberto Manguel
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In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
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During the day, the library is a realm of order.
Alberto Manguel
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There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
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In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
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But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
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Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.
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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
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The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.
Alberto Manguel