Selected information quotes

1. My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating.

2. All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

3. It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.

4. Thoughts, words, ideas and information, free from any bonds or restrictions, is the very concrete which pours out a foundation strong enough that upon which a house, stable and lasting, of true freedom and liberty may be built.

5. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

6. The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

7. News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

8. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

9. Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

10. It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

11. In every place, where there is any thing worthy of observation, there should be a short printed directory for strangers.

12. Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.

13. Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

14. Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

15. No, really, Ronnie, it's good to share information when you know someone else is dating the lunarly challenged.

16. If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.

17. A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

18. Libby was advised by the vice president of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA in the counterproliferation division. Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the CIA.

19. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

20. Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.

21. Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

22. The UN stopped using Chalabi's information as a basis for conducting inspections once the tenuous nature of his sources and his dubious motivations became clear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mainstream US media, which give prominent coverage to sources of information that, had they not been related to Hussein's Iraq, would normally be immediately dismissed.

23. Evil news fly faster still than good.

24. The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

25. 'The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.'

26. In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.

27. Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

28. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

29. Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

30. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

31. There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

32. Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

33. 'They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em'

34. A speech is entertaining only when serenely detached from all information.

35. To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.

36. The cure to information overload is more information. [1]

37. Falsehood has a perennial spring.

38. One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)

39. I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it.

40. Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madames, greeting the punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs and then pimping their books.

41. Short biography at Famous Texans web page

42. 'The most likely reason for the adoption of a relatively small number of discrete intervals as the tonal material for music is that discretization or categorization is a typical, if not universal, strategy used by animals in order to reduce information overload and facilitate processing when subjected to the high-information-conetent signals and/or high information rates from a highly developed sensory system (e.g., Estes, 1972; Terhardt, 1991). An obvious example is the processing of speech information by humans, wherein each language selects a relatively small portion of the available timbral-differences that can be produced by the vocal tract as information-carrying units (phonemes) in the language. A related reason for discrete scales, and another obvious analogy with speech perception, lies in the social aspect of music. Music first developed as, and still largely remains, a social phenomenon associated with religious or other rituals that, like language, necessitated an easily remembered common framework.'

43. Urban Legends at Snopes.com

44. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

45. Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

46. If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. (Sometimes quoted as newspapers.)

47. Put it on Wikipedia.

48. Just what not why...

49. Most of us here in the media are what I call infotainers...Rush Limbaugh is what I call a disinfotainer. He entertains by spreading disinformation.

50. There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

51. German Wikipedia

52. I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.

53. 'En ole saanut mitaan papereita. Minulla on kaksi korvaa, ja olen kuullut kaikenlaista.' ('I haven't got any papers. I have two ears, and I've heard many things.')

54. 'En tieda, kuka tietoja vuotaa.' ('I don't know by whom is the information leaking.')

55. 'Valttelevista lausunnoista on ymmarrettavasti syntynyt epajohdonmukainen kuva. Uskon, etta nyt esittamieni tietojen valossa muodostuu oikea kuva.' ('It's understandable that the avoiding statements have created an illogical image. I believe that the information I will now present will be helpful to form a correct image.')

56. The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

57. 'Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called The Police - I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks - and they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record.' (Source: Writers at Work, Plimpton, George)

58. The characteristic of the present age is craving credulity.

59. As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

60. News is that which comes from the North, East, West and South, and if it comes from only one point on the compass, then it is a class publication and not news.

61. We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn't mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.

62. I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

63. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools. (ch. 1)

64. I couldn't do them if I didn't know horses lived behind them.

65. The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we've started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

66. We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial, - considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

67. Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

68. Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing.

69. So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

70. It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

71. There's a whole industry of conservatives saying, 'Ah, it's those damn liberals,' and a whole group of liberals saying, 'It's all those damn conservatives'... If you tailor your news viewing, as some people are now doing, so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.

72. We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

73. I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

74. The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.

75. What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.

76. There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.

77. You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.

78. Search for Roy Blount, Jr in other articles.

79. No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

80. In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.