Lisbet Rausing:

It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good.

In today's era of electronic abundance, how can libraries archive the dreams and experiences of humankind? What do we discard?

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Rivka Galchen:

I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Rausing:

We have belatedly realized that humankind understands only poorly what will last through the ages.

You see the problem. What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered?

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Alberto Manguel:

For the last seven years, I've lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

Brad Lemley:

It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do -- run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

Stewart Brand:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed?

Toward a New Alexandria