Quotes About Information

Culture cannot compensate for lack of hard knowledge.

Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.

Maybe there is no news, Lily said, but only a moment later he corrected himself. There is news, they just don't put it in the newspapers anymore.

Knowledge is a house that must be built from the ground up. We know how to make the roof. The information is useless if we don't understand the foundations on which it is to be placed.

As Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome Barkow point out: "Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms situated in human minds. These mechanisms are in turn the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process." Clearly, culture cannot just spring forth from nowhere; it must be shaped by, and be responsive to, basic human instincts and innate preferences.

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective.

I recently traveled to Iraq, and I am trying to understand the role torture is playing there. We are told it's about getting information, but I think it's more than that—I think it may also have had to do with trying to build a model country, about erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch.

Just when Americans most need information about the outside world - and their country's complicated and troubling place in it - they are only getting themselves reflected back, over and over and over: Americans weeping, Americans recovering, Americans cheering, Americans praying. A media house of mirrors, when what we all need are more windows on the world.

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. —Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 2006

IT PAYS TO KNOW HOW TO PURCHASE KNOWLEDGE

influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

Like cold-causing rhinoviruses, influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

By one estimate, genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.

Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?

According to Piaget, the best strategy for preschool curriculum is to keep children curious, make them wonder, and offer them real problem-solving challenges, rather than give them information. Many adults still hold the notion that a teacher is someone who shares information. Using Piaget's theory about children's learning requires changing the image of teacher into someone who nurtures inquiry and supports the children's own search for answers.

You can never have too much information. Gather it in and then sift it, and let the unimportant fall through the small holes.

Even with the high-tech air filtration system in a modern facility, the place still smelled like archival storage: old paper, stale manila folders, cardboard, and dust. Libraries and accountants' basements all over the world smelled like this. It was the scent of information waiting to be discovered.

Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.

The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.

when cultural stories remain hidden and untold, they tend to disappear, at least temporarily, leaving one with a void of information about the self. (p.38)

into her bed purely for informational

You take I-55 south, and you'll run into I-20. Or you could take... I was about to be overloaded with information. Oh that sounds just perfect. Let me do just that, or I'll lose track. Sure, glad I could help. Oh, you surely did. We beamed at each other, just two nice women. I had to fight an impulse to say I have a tortured vampire in my trunk, out of sheer giddiness.