James Gleick Quotes

70 quotes in 1191 categories

• 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…
• You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment....
• 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…
• Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
• Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
• The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
• The universe is computing its own destiny.
• It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
• 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…
• 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…
• Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the 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…
• Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified…
• "Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him…
• Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
• I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.
• 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 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…
• The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer…
• Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

Browse James Gleick Quotes by Category