James Gleick Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  James Gleick

  Ideas, People, World

  James Gleick (2011). “Chaos: Making a New Science”, p.44, Open Road Media

  48 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Brain, Distribution, Amount

  19 Copy quote

• Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

  James Gleick

  Information

  28 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Lying, Care, Patterns

  21 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Eye, Mind, Way

  James Gleick (2011). “Chaos: Making a New Science”, p.105, Open Road Media

  46 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Stills

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  People, Waste, Wasting Time

  "James Gleick's survival lessons" by David Diamond, www.wired.com. August 1, 1999.

  4 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Time, Waste, Moments

  "James Gleick's Survival Lessons". Interview with David Diamond, www.wired.com. August 01, 1999.

  9 Copy quote

• Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

  James Gleick

  Order, Sea, Life Sucks

  James Gleick (2011). “Chaos: Making a New Science”, p.326, Open Road Media

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Feelings, Finding Yourself, Suffering

  10 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Doubt, Alternatives, Authority

  4 Copy quote

• When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

  James Gleick

  Attention, Information, Consciousness

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Player, Skills, Mad

  James Gleick (1992). “Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman”, Pantheon

  9 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Running, Long, Stories

  James Gleick (2011). “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood”, p.12, HarperCollins UK

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Change, Time, Understanding

  "5 Big Moments in the History of Knowledge Transfer" by Jason Gots, bigthink.com.

  10 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  People, Principles, Towns

  4 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Purpose, Sometimes, Quixotic

  9 Copy quote

• The universe is computing its own destiny.

  James Gleick

  Destiny, Computing, Universe

  6 Copy quote

• We choose mania over boredom every time.

  James Gleick

  Boredom, Mania

  James Gleick (2000). “Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Strong, Grey Matter, Brain

  James Gleick (2011). “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman”, p.381, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Reading, Past, Mirrors

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Fall, Blow, Ideas

  James Gleick (2011). “Chaos: Making a New Science”, p.23, Open Road Media

  9 Copy quote

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

  James Gleick

  Negative, History Of Life, Life Is

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

  James Gleick

  Knowing, People, Google

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Gleick

  Time, Technology, Efficiency

  James Gleick (2000). “Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything”, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

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