Wit & Attitude Quote by Vartan Gregorian

There is a quietly radical claim tucked into Gregorian's line: libraries are not lifestyle amenities or quaint civic ornaments; they're the memory infrastructure of the species. The phrase "on behalf of all humanity" deliberately overreaches, and that's the point. He's moving the library from the local (your town, your campus) to the moral (a shared obligation to preserve what people thought, made, and got wrong). It's an educator's view of institutions as stewards, not service providers.

The catalog he offers is slyly democratic: "the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity". Pairing "wise" with "stupidity" isn't a joke so much as a defense against sanitizing history. Libraries don't curate a flattering portrait of civilization; they warehouse the full, messy record, including errors that later generations will need to study, refute, or laugh at. That inclusion is also a warning: if you only save what seems intelligent in the moment, you turn archives into propaganda and scholarship into mythology.

Context matters here. Gregorian led major universities and the Carnegie Corporation, working in a period when knowledge was being rapidly digitized and aggressively politicized. His insistence on "records" reads like a preemptive rebuttal to the idea that the internet has replaced libraries, or that cultural institutions should keep only what is "useful" or "appropriate". The subtext is preservation as resistance: against forgetfulness, against censorship by neglect, and against the comforting lie that progress comes from wisdom alone rather than from remembering our absurdity, too.