“For America, only one method: given a certain number of fragments, notes and stories collected over a given time, there must be a solution which integrates them all, including the most banal, into a necessary whole, without adding or removing any: the very necessity which, beneath the surface, presided over their collection. Making the supposition that this is the only material and the best, because it is secretly ordered by the same thinking, and assuming that everything conceived as part of the same obsession has a meaning and that there must necessarily be a solution to the problem of reconstituting it. The work starts out from the certainty that everything is already there and it will be sufficient simply to find the key .

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.

In the same way as we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of knowledge.”