Peggy Noonan Quotes

I have this pet thing about how global communications are moving so fast now, throwing information at you, making everything available to you, and yet I feel it's leaving us more and more isolated.

Everyone is on the internet but they're not all talking with each other. There are groups upon groups out there, but they don't talk to one another. So while the internet brings everyone into a shared space, it does not necessarily bring them together.

The Internet is an open sewer of unfiltered, untreated information. The Internet can make you smarter, faster than anything else in the world. It can also make you dumber faster.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.

Net Neutrality is what makes the Internet so great - and so vital for innovation and creativity.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.

I'm not personally connected to the Internet, although nearly everyone that I know is, and many of them have a great time and no problems with it. And on the surface you can see that the Internet could go an awful long way to educating, enlightening, informing and connecting the world.

The Internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be.

It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.

In general, we need America to take its game up a notch when it comes to broadband. It's important to acknowledge the billions and billions of dollars of investment in fiber. But we need more.

India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

Every pastor, youth pastor, and every parent is in competition with the Internet and the information it is spreading. Most young people don't get their news from CNN or CBS; they get it from bloggers.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.

By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one-ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a State, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle?

The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

I travel to a lot of schools, and I see firsthand that while we do still have a lot of traditional readers, we don't have as many as we used to. And we're missing an awful lot of kids entirely... Do I want to get rid of the Internet? Obviously, I don't want that because of all the amazing things it brings.

We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.

The Internet drives you to an immediate resolution of symptoms but may make it harder to get to the essence of the problem. It’s easier to know what people are saying, but the question is whether diplomats have time to connect that with its deeper historical context.

In many countries traditional bonds of civitas have been subject to a gradual erosion and their inhabitants become disinherited without realizing it.

Even if America is unlikely to descend into another civil war, our present trajectory carries huge risks. Millennials may take charge of the country without much memory of a functional Congress, tolerant public discourse, or social circles that transcend our atomized subcultures. Today’s college students can scarcely recall a life free of internet trolls!

Web publishing can create common spaces; it all depends on how we, the readers and sometimes the producers, react to technological change. If we sort ourselves into narrow groups, common spaces will be in big trouble. But there's no reason not to have common spaces on the Internet. There are lots of them out there.

The Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time.