"When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that……" — James Gleick
"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?"
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James Gleick
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70 Quotes by James Gleick
James Gleick has 70 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must…
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You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment....
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Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It…
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Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
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Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
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The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
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The universe is computing its own destiny.
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It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
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Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds…
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Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is…
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Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.
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The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for…
See all 70 quotes by James Gleick »
More Action Quotes
This quote is filed under Action Quotes,
one of 8,300 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
— Hannah Arendt
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then…
— Hannah Arendt
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
— Hannah Arendt
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
— Hannah Arendt
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All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
— Aristotle
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Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate…
— Aristotle
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Well begun is half done.
— Aristotle
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A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole…
— Aristotle
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Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.
— Aristotle
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We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
— Aristotle
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Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for…
— Aristotle
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What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition…
— Aristotle
See all 8,300 Action Quotes »
