We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution — such call I good books. – Henry David Thoreau