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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.