Top 33 James Gleick Quotes

Words matter. These are the best James Gleick Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Particle physicists may freeze a second, open it up, an

Particle physicists may freeze a second, open it up, and explore its dappled contents like surgeons pawing through an abdomen, but in real life, when events occur within thousandths of a second, our minds cannot distinguish past from future.
James Gleick
It’s fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.
James Gleick
Type ‘What is th’ and faster than you can find the ‘e’ Google is sending choices back at you: ‘What is the cloud?’ ‘What is the mean?’ ‘What is the American dream?’ ‘What is the illuminati?’ Google is trying to read your mind. Only it’s not your mind. It’s the World Brain.
James Gleick
It is seldom right to say that anything is true ‘according to Google.’ Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for ‘hamadryad,’ and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it’s a rock band, too, wouldn’t you know).
James Gleick
In the 1920s, a generation before the coming of solid-state electronics, one could look at the circuits and see how the electron stream flowed. Radios had valves, as though electricity were a fluid to be diverted by plumbing. With the click of the knob came a significant hiss and hum, just at the edge of audibility.
James Gleick
Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.
James Gleick
For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams – in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!
James Gleick
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.
James Gleick
If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century – and surely we do – perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it’s just better not to ask, and better not to look.
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.
James Gleick
Information is crucial to our biological substance – our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.
James Gleick
Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.
James Gleick
Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn’t have to be profound, and it doesn’t have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.
James Gleick
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don’t actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they’re all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.
James Gleick
Children and scientists share an outlook on life. ‘If I do this, what will happen?’ is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.
James Gleick
Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes.
James Gleick
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 wouldn’t necessarily be good.
James Gleick
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
James Gleick
In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It’s a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.
James Gleick
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
Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.
James Gleick
A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It’s a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.
James Gleick
I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There’s a delicate balance.
James Gleick
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.
James Gleick
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.
James Gleick
Granted, I’m more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don’t like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.
James Gleick
I’m trying to look at many, many things in modern life that I believe are going faster, and I’m trying to look at why they’re going faster and what effect they have on us. We all know about FedEx and instant pudding, but it doesn’t mean we’ve looked at all the consequences of our desire for speed.
James Gleick
For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future – a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.
James Gleick
Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.
James Gleick
Patent battles have become a strong catalyst for mergers, reducing competition in various domains. The largest corporations, with gigantic patent portfolios, routinely enter into cross-licensing agreements with their largest competitors.
James Gleick
As for memes, the word ‘meme’ is a cliche, which is to say it’s already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.
James Gleick
The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism a

The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.
James Gleick
The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
James Gleick