120 Information Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

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)

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.

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.

The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused. Newspapers, magazines, and circulating libraries have made mankind wiser. Titles and distinctions, ranks and orders, parade and ceremony, are all going out of fashion. This is roundly and frequently asserted in the streets, and sometimes on theatres of higher rank. Some truth there is in it; and if the opportunity were temperately improved, to the reformation of abuses, the rectification of errors, and the dissipation of pernicious prejudices, a great advantage it might be. But, on the other hand, false inferences may be drawn from it, which may make mankind wish for the age of dragons, giants, and fairies.

In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there has been too much of)with ideas (of which there are too few. I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies. I keep sputtering out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic.

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with one another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have first hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.

And now you know -- the rest of the story.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

Today, we are truly a global family. What happens in one part of the world may affect us all. This, of course, is not only true of the negative things that happen, but is equally valid for the positive developments. We not only know what happens elsewhere, thanks to the extraordinary modern communications technology. We are also directly affected by events that occur far away.

'There is no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can't Google the answer.'[citation needed]

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

In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.

Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.

Muslims have a credibility problem. In the modern era, we have a tendency to believe and repeat wild theories, with our only criteria for accepting those theories being that they lend support to pre-existing attitudes. It takes an extremely sympathetic person to overlook such a deficiency, and sympathy for Muslims in a post 9/11 West is in short supply.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources and impossible to write modern history because we have too many.

That's cuz she ain't ever gonna know, bitch!

US forces think they know the location of Saddam Hussein's sons...Uday, Qusay and Gary.

Who would Hitler say deceived him about conditions in concentration camps if not Kaltenbrunner, even as he would deceive us?

We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based - a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.

The best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.

That's what the problem is with the Internet, this great escape that we have, everything automatically becomes fact!

A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on. (This has also been attributed to Winston Churchill.)

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. (p.11)

The woman inside was important now. Perhaps the most important in the world. What she knew would help destroy an enemy when she told it. My hands in my pockets balled into hard knots to keep from shaking and for a moment the throbbing ache of the welts and cuts that laced my skin stopped.

'To move the shade' is used when you cannot see the enemy's spirit. In large-scale strategy, when you cannot see the enemy's position, indicate that you are about to attack strongly, to discover his resources. It is easy then to defeat hin with a different method once you see his resources.

[Television is] a really dreadful influence on all of us. Don't ever look at local television news again. It's all crap. There's no news, there's no information. It's negative, negative, negative. You look at that, and you think the world is coming to an end.

I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.

Wikipedia, eh? Must be accurate then! The age interview (17 Feb 2007)

All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the supression of the Internet is really aimed at supressing knowledge of the radical political alternatives that are now available.

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.

The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another.

All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses- the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?

Il faut toujours en fait de nouvelles attendre le sacrement de la confirmation.

'This next song goes out to those who still believe that there is an american dream. And still believe that within that dream there is something called freedom. It is time to fucking wake up, and begin to truly think for ourselves, and find new sources of information... otherwise - things like what's happening in the persian gulf with continue. They will be able to make decisions for you, unless you fucking wake up, and take that veil of complacence from your eyes, and fucking begin to remove the bullet from your head.' [Said before performing Bullet in the Head]

Short biography at Famous Texans web page

'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.'

Urban Legends at Snopes.com

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

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

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

Put it on Wikipedia.

Just what not why...

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.

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

German Wikipedia

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.

'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.')

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

'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.')

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.

'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)

The characteristic of the present age is craving credulity.

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

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.