quotes down, and he would string them together 
with blurbs or commentaries of his own. That was 
the way he wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy . And he 
was reproached for doing that. People said that is 
general plagiarism or a rip-off of other people’s 
ideas. He didn’t see it that way at all. He saw that 
by using these chunks, these gems, these 
fragments that you shore up against your ruins, 
as Eliot would say, by doing that he would actually 
give them a different kind of content and meaning. 
Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, said, don’t 
tell me that what I am saying is nothing new, that 
you have seen it before. You may have seen those 
things before and the order in which I am putting