Group 1:

They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure that they are missing, but
also because I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in which literature
has been relegated—like some hidden vice—to the margins of social and personal life, and
transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually
barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom.

Group 2:

It always irritated Borges when he was asked, “What is the use of literature?” It seemed to him
a stupid question, to which he would reply: “No one would ask what is the use of a canary’s
song or a beautiful sunset.” If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks to them, life is even for
an instant less ugly and less sad, is it not petty to seek practical justifications?

Group 3:
A humanity without reading. untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf-
mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous problems of communication due to its crude and
rudimentary language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not read, or reads
little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say
little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.

Group 4:

I was not present at Gates’s little discourse; I learned these details from the press. Had I been
there I would have booed Gates for proclaiming shamelessly his intention to send me and my
colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And I would have
vigorously disputed his analysis. Can the screen really replace the book in all its aspects? I am
not so certain. I am fully aware of the enormous revolution that new technologies such as the
Internet have caused in the fields of communication and the sharing of information, and I
confess that the Internet provides invaluable help to me every day in my work; but my
gratitude for these extraordinary conveniences does not imply a belief that the electronic
screen can replace paper, or that reading on a computer can stand in for literary reading.

Group 5:
Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the
worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a
profound part of humanity. These monsters eager for transgression are hidden in the most
intimate recesses of our being; and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious
occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys
rationality, community, and even existence.