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Century Quotes

“But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?”

Source: George Steiner: A Reader

“Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate is how you think about information that's presented in front of you. I think that's the great challenge. You have people who believe they do know how to think about the information, but don't, and they're in the position of power and legislation. You can't base a society on non-objectively verifiable truth. Otherwise, it's a fantasy land and science is the pathway to those emerging truths that are hard-earned and that some have taken decades, if not centuries, to emerge from experiments all around the world.”

“As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on.”

Source: Who Owns the Future?

“At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.”

“But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.”

Age Levels Half Century Information Changed Ignorance Perception Shock Entering Familiarity Numb Insensitive Information Age Cumulative

Author:Anna Quindlen

“Maybe we need a tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop. Now, maybe that's wrong, maybe that's expensive, maybe we can't do it, but I'll tell you, any signal that we can send to the poorest Americans that says, 'We're going into a 21st century, third-wave information age, and so are you, and we want to carry you with us.'”

Want Needs Age Century Information Internet Taxes Thirds Wave Credit Expensive Free Speech 21st Century Signals Poorest Laptops Information Age

Author:Newt Gingrich

“At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the Information Age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.”

People Age Form Force Perfect History Century Information Shapes Unions Dawn 21st Century Limitless Information Age Limitless Potential

Book:Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1997

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1997

“I can think of few more worthy achievements than keeping a library alive and well for a century. As far as I am concerned, one of the absolute backbones of a free society and a democracy is the library offering access to a treasure house of information to all.”

Thinking Wells I Can House Democracy Alive Century Information Achievement Concerned Absolutes Library Worthy Access Treasure Offering Free Society Backbone

Author:Gillian Roberts

“University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.”

Reason Existence Teach Economy Century Information Students Civilization Institutions University Profit Technique Data Entity Scholarship Skulls Torches Downloads

Author:Bruce Sterling

“This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.”

Thinking Seems Law Century Information Normal Dimensions Anticipation Glimpse Compounds Prophetic Causality

Author:Terence McKenna

“I noticed whenever you call information, 411, there's always a computer voice, and they go, 'What number would you like? City and state, please.' 'Yeah, I'd like the number of Macy's in Century City, California.' 'Did you say 'pretzel nuggets'?”

States Voice Numbers Cities Century Information Please Computer Yeah California Nuggets Pretzels Macy's

Author:Andy Kindler