Darnton Robert Quotes

#1. The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their property, so to speak.

Robert Darnton

#2. We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the future for decades or more, despite the endless innovations of technology.

Robert Darnton

#3. While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

Robert Darnton

#4. I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Robert Darnton

#5. I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

Claire Tomalin

#6. As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

Robert Darnton

#7. The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

Robert Darnton

#8. She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven.

Louis Bromfield

#9. People think that when you use Google you're finding exactly what you need, but really, you need expert help.

Robert Darnton

#10. William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

James Dickey

#11. All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.

Robert Darnton

#12. We need librarians who can handle this tremendous jumble of information that is in cyberspace.

Robert Darnton

#13. As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

Robert Darnton

#14. It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

Robert Darnton

#15. People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media.

Robert Darnton

#16. The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

Robert Darnton

#17. It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous potential for education and even for self-empowerment of individuals.

Robert Darnton

#18. I'm sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I've seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.

Joseph Wambaugh

#19. I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.

Robert Darnton

#20. Texts are always in flux.

Robert Darnton

#21. The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

Robert Darnton

#22. Today I love you more than ever; tomorrow I will love you even more. I need you more than ever; I want you more than ever.

Cecelia Ahern

#23. When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

Robert Darnton

#24. I believe we should celebrate new possibilities of combining the printed codex with electronic technology ... The information ecology is getting richer, not thinner.

Robert Darnton

#25. I am not a dumb animal to be browbeaten, cowed, lashed, coerced or goaded into anything I do not think is right.

Earle Combs

#26. Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.

Sidney Hook

#27. His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#28. I took English courses in college, but I don't have an English degree. I have a degree in economics.

Patrick Carman

#29. I want to continue to strengthen Harvard's fabulous collections in old printed material, but at the same time, I want to help Harvard move into the world of digitized information.

Robert Darnton

#30. Anger is too pathetic. Anger is as weak as fear.

Anne Rice

#31. I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

Thomas Browne

#32. I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.

Robert Darnton

#33. Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty.

Robert Darnton

#34. Pummel me all you want," I say. "Pummel me to death, in fact. My answers will not change."
The Invierno step back, frowning. "You must love her very much," he says, not unkindly.

Rae Carson

#35. Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

Robert Darnton

#36. My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

Robert Darnton

#37. News in not what happened but a story about what happened.

Robert Darnton

#38. By seeing the way a joke worked in the horseplay of a printing shop two centuries ago, we may be able to recapture that missing element - laughter, sheer laughter, the thigh-slapping, rib-cracking Rabelaisian kind, rather than the Voltairian smirk with which we are familiar.

Robert Darnton

#39. I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

Robert Darnton