James Gleick Quotes

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

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

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

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

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

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

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

It is not true that people who accomplish things don't waste time and that people who waste time don't accomplish things. The very concept is ill-informed. You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

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.

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.

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

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

One of the ways the telegraph changed us as humans was it gave us a new sense of what time it is. It gave us an understanding of simultaneity. It gave us the ability to synchronize clocks from one place to another. It made it possible for the world to have standard time and time zones and then Daylight Savings Time and then after that jetlag. All of that is due to the telegraph because, before that, the time was whatever it was wherever you were.

We choose mania over boredom every time.

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

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.

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

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

The universe is computing its own destiny.

Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

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

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.