Steven Jay Gould on the End of the Second Millenium

 “People in the past, in religious civilizations, had a real profound terror of apocalyptic catastrophe. What frightens us in our secular age is the computer breakdown that’ll occur if computers interpret the 00 of the year 2000 and a return to 1900.”

Conversations About the End of Time introduction, ed. Catherine David et al (1999)

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.