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

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.

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong

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

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

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

One of the ways the telegraph changed us as humans was it gave us a new sense of what time it is. It gave us an understanding of simultaneity. It gave us the ability to synchronize clocks from one place to another. It made it possible for the world to have standard time and time zones and then Daylight Savings Time and then after that jetlag. All of that is due to the telegraph because, before that, the time was whatever it was wherever you were.