Darnton V Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Digital data are more fragile than printed material. — Robert Darnton

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

It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library. — Robert Darnton

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

News in not what happened but a story about what happened. — Robert Darnton

People think that when you use Google you're finding exactly what you need, but really, you need expert help. — Robert Darnton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves. — Robert Darnton

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

The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed.The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose. — Robert Darnton

To eat one's fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite, was the principal pleasure that the peasants dangled before their imagination, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.
They [the peasants] also imagined other dreams coming true, including the standard run of castles and princesses. But their wishes usually remained fixed on common objects in the everyday world. One hero gets "a cow and some chickens"; another, an armoire full of linens. A third settles for light work, regular meals, and a pipe full of tobacco. And when gold rains into the fireplace of a fourth, he uses it to buy "food, clothes, a horse, land." In most of the tales, wish fulfillment turns into a program for survival, not a fantasy of escape. — Robert Darnton

Texts are always in flux. — Robert Darnton

We need librarians who can handle this tremendous jumble of information that is in cyberspace. — Robert Darnton

How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore. — John Darnton

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

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything. — Robert Darnton

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

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

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

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

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