28 Quotes by Robert Darnton

Dress often serves as a thermometer for measuring the political temperature.

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.

News in not what happened but a story about what happened.

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.

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.

I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.

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

It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous potential for education and even for self-empowerment of individuals.

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.