"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

— Frederick Douglass

"The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I [haven't] read."

— Abraham Lincoln
 

"So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install, A lovely bookshelf on the wall."

— Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."

— Emilie Buchwald

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

— Jorge Luis Borges

"There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world.  Love of books is the best of all."

— Jacqueline Kennedy

"Babies are born with the instinct to speak; the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different."

— Steven Pinker

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet."

— Lady Montagu, providing advice on raising her granddaughter, 1752

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go."

— Dr. Seuss, "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!"