James Gleick famous quotes

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
-- James Gleick

#Ideas #People #World

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
-- James Gleick

#Information

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
-- James Gleick

#Brain #Distribution #Interconnectedness

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
-- James Gleick

#Attention #Information #Consciousness

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.
-- James Gleick

#Book #Gun #Technology

Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.
-- James Gleick

#Cyberspace #Draws #Instant

The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
-- James Gleick

#Reading #Past #Mirrors

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.
-- James Gleick

#Player #Skills #Mad

The Internet has taken shape with startlingly little planning? The most universal and indispensable network on the planet somehow burgeoned without so muchasa boardofdirectors, never minda mergers-and- acquisitions department. There is a paradoxical lesson here for strategists. In economic terms, the great corporations are acting like socialist planners, while old- fashioned free-market capitalism blossoms at their feet.
-- James Gleick

#Taken #Feet #Acting

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good.
-- James Gleick

#Philosophy #Book #Europe

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.
-- James Gleick

#Choices #Fundamentals #Information

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
-- James Gleick

#Knowing #People #Google

We choose mania over boredom every time.
-- James Gleick

#Boredom #Mania

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.
-- James Gleick

#Thinking #Flow #Metaphor

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.
-- James Gleick

#New York #Butterfly #Air

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.
-- James Gleick

#Communication #Writing #Echoes

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
-- James Gleick

#Purpose #Sometimes #Quixotic

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment....
-- James Gleick

#Time #Waste #Moments

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had....
-- James Gleick

#Time #Technology #Efficiency

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
-- James Gleick

#Thinking #Language #Paradox

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.
-- James Gleick

#Art #Book #Cds

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
-- James Gleick

#Lying #Care #Patterns

The universe is computing its own destiny.
-- James Gleick

#Destiny #Computing #Universe

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
-- James Gleick

#Negative #Life Is #Term

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?
-- James Gleick

#Oracles #Half #Way

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
-- James Gleick

#Running #Long #Becoming

For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.
-- James Gleick

#Powerful #Knowledge #Creativity

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
-- James Gleick

#Book #Soul #Enemy

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.
-- James Gleick

#Becoming #Chaos #States

Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
-- James Gleick

#Order #Sea #Life Sucks

"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
-- James Gleick

#Science #Richard Feynman #Energy

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.
-- James Gleick

#Book #Would Be #Culture

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong
-- James Gleick

#People #Principles #Towns

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.
-- James Gleick

#Stills

The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.
-- James Gleick

#Feelings #Finding Yourself #Suffering