Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994
First paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)
“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.”
As We May Think (1945)
Context: Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Vannevar Bush 57
American electrical engineer and science administrator 1890–1974Related quotes

Of the Home Office Immigration and Nationality Directorate; BBC News 23 May 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5007148.stm
The Exhausted School: Bending The Bars of Traditional Education, Berkeley Hills Books; 2 edition (2002) p. 53

Statement to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Boston, Massachusetts (27 August 1880): published as "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light" in American Journal of Sciences, Third Series, vol. XX, n°118 (October 1880), pp. 305-324.

Vol. I : The Dedication (March 1772)
Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–1774)
Context: Respect a parliamentary king, and chearfully pay all parliamentary taxes; but have nothing to do with a parliamentary religion, or a parliamentary God.
Religious rights, and religious liberty, are things of inestimable value. For these have many of our ancestors suffered and died; and shall we, in the sunshine of prosperity, desert that glorious cause, from which no storms of adversity or persecution could make them swerve? Let us consider if as a duty of the first rank with respect to moral obligation, to transmit to our posterity, and provide, as far as we can, for transmitting, unimpaired, to the latest generations, that generous zeal for religion and liberty, which makes the memory of our forefathers so truly illustrious.

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 14

2010s, 2016, April, Foreign Policy Speech (27 April 2016)

Source: New results in linear filtering and prediction theory (1961), p. 95 Opening paragraphs

Cosmic Trigger II : Down to Earth (1991)