Top 100 James Gleick Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”

— James Gleick

2. “You can’t waste time and you can’t save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment...”

— James Gleick

3. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.”

— James Gleick

4. “Nullius in verba was the Royal Society’s motto. Don’t take anyone’s word for it.”

— James Gleick

5. “First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.”

— James Gleick

6. “Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.”

— James Gleick

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

— James Gleick

8. “To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”

— James Gleick

9. “The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.”

— James Gleick

10. “At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.”

— James Gleick

11. “By any objective measure, the modern business of “psychopharmacology” – the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself – has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows.”

— James Gleick

12. “Theories permit consciousness to ‘jump over its own shadow,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.”

— James Gleick

13. “Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.”

— James Gleick

14. “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

15. “The universe is computing its own destiny.”

— James Gleick

16. “Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.”

— James Gleick

17. “I can’t remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.”

— James Gleick

18. “God plays dice with the universe,” is Ford’s answer to Einstein’s famous question. “But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.”

— James Gleick

19. “Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.”

— James Gleick

20. “Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience.”

— James Gleick

21. “In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”

— James Gleick

22. “You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.”

— James Gleick

23. “Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.”

— James Gleick

24. “Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton’s physics. As one physicist put it: “Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.”

— James Gleick

25. “He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.”

— James Gleick

26. “I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.”

— James Gleick

27. “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

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

— James Gleick

29. “The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.”

— James Gleick

30. “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

31. “Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, resisted his era’s new-media hype: “The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter.” Up to a point, he was right. 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

32. “He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers “are always on the outside making stupid remarks,” he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.”

— James Gleick

33. “We choose mania over boredom every time.”

— James Gleick

34. “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

35. “Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.”

— James Gleick

36. “1. You can’t win; 2. You can’t break even either.” But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny.”

— James Gleick

37. “Redundancy – inefficient by definition – serves as the antidote to confusion.”

— James Gleick

38. “There is no getting into the future except by waiting.”

— James Gleick

39. “Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. – David L. Watson.”

— James Gleick

40. “DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level – an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.”

— James Gleick

41. “The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures?”

— James Gleick

42. “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

43. “Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.”

— James Gleick

44. “What English speakers call “computer science” Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik.”

— James Gleick

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

— James Gleick

46. “Entropy – already a difficult and poorly understood concept – is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.”

— James Gleick

47. “Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.”

— James Gleick

48. “Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing.”

— James Gleick

49. “Information is closely associated with uncertainty.” Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.”

— James Gleick

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

— James Gleick