Katharine Whitehorn Quotes

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

… science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race....

Records just happen.

A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

I go through all of my old notebooks, and I put an X on every page when everything has been entered into the computer, and sometimes that takes 15 years. But eventually the notebooks are full of X's, and they're no good to me anymore.

Seven is more than a lucky number or a famous baseball player's uniform. It's the brain's natural shepherd, herding vast amounts of information into manageable chunks.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

We're not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.

All the information in the world has been pretty dispersed, but Google's mission has been to organize it and make it universally accessible.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.

Item numbers have existed from time immemorial.

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

You've got to be happy if they get your facts right. Since January I don't think I've recognized a damned thing that I've filed. I just pour everything out of the boot. Otherwise you get a phone call at three in the morning asking why you left out that the candidate had his teeth drilled that morning.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

In order to be in control, you have to have a definite plan for at least a reasonable period of time. So how, may I ask, can man be in control if he can't even draw up a plan for a ridiculously short period of time, say, a thousand years, and is, moreover, unable to ensure his own safety for even the next day?

What's important now? - To evaluate the past, focus on the future, and tell you what you have to do in the present

There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.