David Gelernter Quotes

The future was and remains the quintessential American art form. Other nations sit back and let their futures happen; we construct ours. We can let the future happen, or take the trouble to imagine it. We can imagine it dark or bright-and in the long run, that's how it will be.

The first step is always to succeed in becoming surprised - to notice that there is something funny going on.

We can't share the earth with pure evil anymore than we can share the earth with smallpox.

Software unification. So that I no longer care what computing device I pick up, whether it's a laptop or desktop, whether it's one I own or one in a public place, whether it has a small screen or a large screen.

If we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history.

Computers make people stupid.

The book is a form in which some of the greatest masterpieces that mankind has ever achieved are expressed;

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?

Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

I would love to see writing taught online because at university like Yale, there are not enough teachers who are able to teach writing well, or in some cases, there are none.

Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac.

Good programmers know what's beautiful and bad ones don't.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.