John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who died yesterday (April 13, 2008) at the age of 96. He taught Richard Feynman. He worked on the Manhattan Project. He coined the phrases black hole and wormhole. He was also the son, brother, father and uncle of librarians.

In 1984, he gave the graduation address to the University of Texas library school. The theme of his speech, which focused on his father’s work as a public library director, was on Selling Library Service. It is well worth reading.

Nothing does more than information, rightly grasped, to open the doors of the world to a better tomorrow; and no agency does more than the library—in today’s new and wider sense—to provide the most reliable information, the best thinking on the whole sweep of human concerns. The library is the university of the people.

We all count ourselves as friends of civilization. We also know that there are enemies of civilization. That burner of books named Adolf Hitler was not the last. We see them today, and we will see more tomorrow. How can one of these enemies destroy all of what we call civilization? How can he most effectively stamp out a nation’s or a community’s breadth of outlook, destroy its sense of history, extinguish its visions of greatness, and reduce us all to unenlightened clods? Simple! Wipe out every source of information! And begin with the library! Why? Because that’s where people go to get their own information in their own way on their own questions.

It does not take hammer, fire, and dynamite to destroy our libraries and information centers. Indifference is enough. Just keep cutting the budget a little every year. Or keep the budget fixed and let inflation do the job of destruction just as effectively and more insidiously.

There is a still more subtle way to destroy what we hold dear. Promote the idea that television carries all that anybody needs to know. Create a docile people. Tell everyone to sit in front of the tube. Let someone else pick out what scenes we shall see, what English we shall hear, what standards we shall accept. Stay passive. Never think for ourselves. Never learn the art of expressing ourselves with clarity and strength. Never put together a well-reasoned statement on anything. Above all, never write. Cure people of that nonsensical idea that we should go to the library to get our own information in our own way on our own questions. This curative program, thoroughly adhered to, will make it unnecessary to burn books and dynamite libraries and information centers. Nobody will ever bother to open a book or consult an information terminal.

Nobody? Nobody read or write or speak? Then the enemies of values, of history, and of imagination, and of all that we call civilization, will have accomplished their aim without once having lifted a hand.