Quotes About Darnton

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. We never thought the show would last this long.

Michael Shanks

#4. 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

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

Robert Darnton

#6. 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

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

Robert Darnton

#8. 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

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

Robert Darnton

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

Robert Darnton

#11. Before a person can achieve the kind of life he wants, he must think, act, walk, talk and conduct himself in all of his affairs as would the person he wishes to become.

Zig Ziglar

#12. Dear child, I see your eyes - you already know the truth. Whomever you are waiting for ... they're never coming back.

Shannon L. Alder

#13. 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

#14. One of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence - he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.

Jon Meacham

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Texts are always in flux.

Robert Darnton

#18. No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dreams that you wish will come true.

Walt Disney Company

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart.

Mahatma Gandhi

#22. I think cynicism is more enduring than sentimentality.

Alexander Payne

#23. 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

#24. The bud of a rose grows in darkness. It knows nothing of the sun, yet it pushes at the darkness that confines it until at last the walls give way and the rose bursts forth, spreading its petals into the light. I love him.

Donna Woolfolk Cross

#25. 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

#26. I'm fascinated by male vulnerability.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

Robert Darnton

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

Robert Darnton

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

Robert Darnton

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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