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Observations on Information
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Published Wednesday, November 05, 2014 @ 6:25 PM EST
Nov 05 2014


(Robert Mankoff in "The New Yorker")

A good way for ineffective people to cling to power in an organization is by creating a monopoly on information.
-Scott Adams

A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.
-Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
-James Madison

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.
-Carl Sagan

All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to fill your head with information.
-Walt Disney

America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information.
-Tom Clancy

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious- just dead wrong.
-Russell Baker

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
-Flannery O'Connor

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

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Courage is often lack of insight, whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.
-Peter Ustinov

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.
-Ray Bradbury

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
-Gertrude Stein

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?
-Noam Chomsky

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-Franklin P. Adams

If you control the flow of information, you can control the conversation around important issues. If you can control the conversation, you can change this country.
-Al Franken

If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons.
-Alice Cooper

If you're older, you're smarter. I just believe that. If you're in an argument with someone older than you, you should listen to 'em. Even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have.
-Louis C.K.

Imagine a school with children that can read and write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.
-Peter Cochrane

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
-Pauline Kael

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.
-Michael Crichton

Information is money, but data is squat.
-Angela Llama-Butler

Information is the currency of democracy.
-Thomas Jefferson

Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar.
-Dr. George Lundberg

Information wants to be free, but it also wants to be archived. Time is no kinder to information than it is to any mythical substance.
-Bruce Sterling

Information wants to be free. Perspective wants to be expensive.
-Hugh McCloud

Information's pretty thin stuff, unless mixed with experience.
-Clarence Day

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.
-John Naisbitt

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
-Edward R. Murrow

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used.
-Carl Sagan

Most people think they need information when they really need knowledge, and think they need knowledge when they really need wisdom.
-Idries Shaw

Never underestimate your listener's intelligence, or overestimate you listener's information.
-Eric Sevareid

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
-Marshall McLuhan

People are like almanacs... you never can find the information you're looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.
-Zelda Fitzgerald

Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, 'Information,' for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it.
-Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness.
-Eric Sevareid

The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.
-James Randi

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The importance of information is directly proportional to its probability.
-Claude Shannon

The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many.
-John Naisbitt

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.
-Edward R. Murrow

The surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
-Mark Twain

There is an infinite amount of information on the Internet, most of it wrong.
-Unattributed

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
-John Naisbitt

We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.
-Marshall McLuhan

We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource (information) that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.
-John Naisbitt

What information consumes is rather obvious- it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
-Herbert Simon

World War III is a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation.
-Marshall McLuhan

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(November 6 is also the birthday of Zig Ziglar.)


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