The quote’s a bit dated. It’s pre-internet thinking. It’s aimed at people who want to be continually learning something.
Delays getting a book from some other library can be arbitrarily long depending on which book you need, even if the library is close.
Real conspiracies are often exposed by people theorizing about them.
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.
Nassim Taleb
Here comes the supremos to equate money with speech.
It also greatly improved readability of the language. Since switching to the standard of using 4-space tabs, I’ve not had any problems except when dredging up someone’s old Python 2 code.
I think if Harris had kicked Trump in the nuts by calling him a traitor and a pedo, and promised medicare for all she would have won.