We choose mania over boredom every time.

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

Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.

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.

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.

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

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.