James Gleick

"Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world."

"It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad."

"We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and f MRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there."

"Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin."

"Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching."

"Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers."

"Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes."

"The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence."

"The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing"

"In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail"

"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. -- Mark Kac"

"the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015]."

"The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015]."