David Gelernter Quotes

Books will soon be obsolete in the schools... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.

The Saylor Foundation is meant to be a gadfly to encourage Google, Apple, MIT, Harvard, the United States government, and the Chinese government to aggressively pursue digital education.

I believe e-courses will eventually change people's attitude toward learning. Education will play an increasingly dominant role in people's lives. For people of all ages and all geographies.

For more than a hundred years much complaint has been made of the unmethodical way in which schools are conducted, but it is only within the last thirty that any serious attempt has been made to find a remedy for this state of things. And with what result? Schools remain exactly as they were.

I don't think Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump really have friends. But Trump has openly admired Putin for many years, with no reservations. He even seems to idolize him. Neither his cabinet appointees nor the civil servants in the Pentagon and the State Department feel the same way, however, so we don't know what this admiration will bring.

Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what "is" that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it's a new business or anything at all.

I think my manager of 30-some odd years now, Tom Hammond. He's as fine a person as you could ever meet. And he's had great theatrical taste and has influenced me that way.

From an evolutionary standpoint you can't just wipe everything out and start over, and I don't think you can do it in the school system either.

I think the early years, the first decade of your life, is the most formative in a way.

I've been audited for many, many years in a row, which I think is unfair, but that's the way it is.

Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you've done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I'll be damned, I did this today. It doesn't matter how good it is, or how bad-you did it. At the end of the week you'll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year.

I do think there are always ways to create what seem like insurmountable powers, but then suddenly you find their limitations and that's the nature of comic book storytelling - always has been.

That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.

We are never really in control. We just think we are when things happen to be going our way.

I don't feel any part of religion. I think the Bible is God's gift of salvation that He gave me because I trusted in Him when I was six year-old. It was a gift and I didn't earn it.

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

Looking for happiness is a sure way to sadness, I think. You have to take each moment as it comes.

It's almost obscene when you see people who haven't matured, who haven't changed, who don't have the weight of years on them. So that's interesting to me - to think about playing him into the future, anew.

I spent several years in a north Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?

Obviously, it's had a huge effect on repetitive music or dance music or house music. Ambient in the last ten years has infiltrated into all those repetitive musics. I don't know what part it plays in pop necessarily but I'm sure there's some connection. But in all the music that deals with experimental repetition, drum and bass, dub, various kinds of house music, there's always been a quality of atmosphere and ambience. I think it's infiltrated that pretty heavily.

It fulfils the purpose of Universities if they can find out ways of achieving those feats which haven't been achieved till now.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

Some people think it's naive to think we can make love our new bottom line. What I believe is naive is thinking human civilization as we know it will survive another two hundred years if we do not.