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 DarntonRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the responsibility of utilizing technology to ensure access to information for all citizens.
Robert Darnton highlights the transformative power of modern technology in making knowledge and information accessible to everyone, reinforcing the idea that with this capability comes a civic responsibility. He argues that if society fails to leverage technology to disseminate information from research libraries to all individuals, we are neglecting our duty to promote informed citizenship and equal access to knowledge.
Themes
TechnologyAccessibilityKnowledgeCivic DutyInformation
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about digital libraries, I might quote this to stress the importance of access to research.
More from Robert Darnton
All quotes →Similar quotes
Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
Bertolt BrechtRead
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Bruce SchneierRead
The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.
Steve BallmerRead
The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.
J. K. RowlingRead
Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.
Edwin Howard ArmstrongRead
Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.
Colson WhiteheadRead