Quotes from James Gleick

Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

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.

Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.

One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the runways.

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 Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

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 to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

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

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

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

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

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

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

Maybe that's why young people make success. They don't know enough. Because when you know enough it's obvious that every idea that you have is no good.

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

The universe is computing its own destiny.

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion.

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

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment .... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator — an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.

Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.