Top 100 James Gleick Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.”

— James Gleick

52. “During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.”

— James Gleick

53. “It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.”

— James Gleick

54. “The principle is that nature does something against its own will, and by self-entanglement, produces beauty.”

— James Gleick

55. “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong. The.”

— James Gleick

56. “Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.”

— James Gleick

57. “Chaos is a creator of information – another apparent paradox.”

— James Gleick

58. “They meant to bring back together, as a unified subject, the discipline that had been subdivided for undergraduates into mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and optics.”

— James Gleick

59. “The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.”

— James Gleick

60. “The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.”

— James Gleick

61. “Gregor Mendel’s years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but something is preserved whole; it does not blend or diffuse; it must be quantized. Mendel had discovered the gene, though he did not name it. For him it was more an algebraic convenience than a physical entity.”

— James Gleick

62. “Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these – not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach – is our now.”

— James Gleick

63. “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 wouldnt necessarily be good.”

— James Gleick

64. “The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.”

— James Gleick

65. “Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.”

— James Gleick

66. “Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.”

— James Gleick

67. “In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.”

— James Gleick

68. “China’s official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history – “casually.”

— James Gleick

69. “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

70. “One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow.”

— James Gleick

71. “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

— James Gleick

72. “The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex.”

— James Gleick

73. “He was going to kill Russell’s dream of a perfect logical system.”

— James Gleick

74. “Wikipedia features a popular article called “Errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.” This article is, of course, always in flux. All Wikipedia is. At any moment the reader is catching a version of truth on the wing.”

— James Gleick

75. “The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.”

— James Gleick

76. “When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?”

— James Gleick

77. “Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures.”

— James Gleick

78. “You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation.”

— James Gleick

79. “This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent,” he wrote, “and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it.” The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants.”

— James Gleick

80. “It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.”

— James Gleick

81. “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.”

— James Gleick

82. “He was going to show that the paradoxes were not excrescences; they were fundamental.”

— James Gleick

83. “Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated – created from connections that were not there before.”

— James Gleick

84. “They could see from the start that Wilson’s idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless – but on which side of the border?”

— James Gleick

85. “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.”

— James Gleick

86. “The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.”

— James Gleick

87. “The Selfish Gene – he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

— James Gleick

88. “This was the first time anyone suggested the genome was an information store measurable in bits. Shannon’s guess was conservative, by at least four orders of magnitude.”

— James Gleick

89. “Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.”

— James Gleick

90. “Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist’s swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.”

— James Gleick

91. “The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.”

— James Gleick

92. “So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.”

— James Gleick

93. “In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail.”

— James Gleick

94. “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

95. “The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000.”

— James Gleick

96. “Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art. Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn’t. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.”

— James Gleick

97. “The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract – a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.”

— James Gleick

98. “The Difference Engine stands – for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London – as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go.”

— James Gleick

99. “In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet’s statistics. In search of data on the letters’ relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.”

— James Gleick

100. “Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles’ heel.”

— James Gleick