Quotes About Information

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Whatever one says on the air is bound to be misunderstood; for people take from the heard or printed discourse that which they are predisposed to hear or read, not what is there- all that TV can do is to increase the number of misunderstanders by many thousandfold – and at the same time to increase the range of misunderstanding by providing no objective text to which the voluntarily ignorant can be made to refer.

He was a mine of irrelevant information and unasked-for good advice. Once started, he went on and on—boomingly.

I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information?

It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it.

They're always helpful, those people. Which people? asked Ulf. Librarians. They know everything.

You can't look anywhere without accidentally seeing the news.

It is relatively easy to design for the perfect cases, when everything goes right, or when all the information required is available in proper format.

Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.

Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.

most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.

Hierarchies are brilliant systems inventions, not only because they give a system stability and resilience, but also because they reduce the amount of information that any part of the system has to keep track of.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.

The state has the authority to take citizens' private property—in this case, their genetic information—without due process. Those are the features of a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Jim

How are we to teach our children to say "no" to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say "no" to? When we try to keep sex secret from our kids, they are aware that something is going on, but they don't know what. And if we leave them to get their sex information in the playground or on the street, from equally ill-informed other kids, we consign them to the jungle.

Traditional Blackfeet saw the natural world in terms of awe and mystery. Animals lived in metaphorical relationships to them; the creatures were other nations. Every plant and animal passed coded information to man. Part of the price western science has paid for analytical power is that it has transformed the natural world into something alien.

When you lived on the wrong side of the law, information, however vague or apparently meaningless, was everything. It gave you leverage. And leverage was power.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own set of laws.

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

could cite endless studies, but let me finish by quoting Nicholas Carr. His book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, came out back in 2011.

And Internet is incoming only," continued Knight. "Brain Trust scientists, and others on this island, can enter terms into a Google search bar, but that's the only way they can interact with the outside world. The results of their searches can be opened and downloaded, but it's one-way traffic only." He smiled. "None of this was easy to do, but it is quite foolproof.