Quotes About Information

No computer or smartphone can ever be considered 100 percent 'safe.' We're all engaged in a perpetual battle with criminals and hostile governments trying to use computers and the Internet to steal information and identities.

If you happen to tell me where you were born, your date of birth and that kind of information, then I'm 98 percent of the way to stealing your identity.

Apple was very important in terms of disrupting the music business and remaking the television business. They made it harder for people to make money on the things that they produce. In news, they've created Apple News, and they've tried to steer people towards information.

The idea of 24-hour news, if you really step back, is pretty insane. Just even saying '24-hour news' almost has satire laced in it.

There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

Amid credible national security concerns related to Huawei, ZTE, and other 5G firms, we must take concrete steps to protect the privacy and data of American consumers and companies.

The president can take steps to make sure the American public knows what its Justice Department and FBI have been up to.

Collecting the facts is a revolutionary act. Insisting on the right to do so is perhaps the most subversive action possible

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get them, get them right, or they will get you wrong.

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.

We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves where the information originated, and how much distortion—deliberate or otherwise—is likely to have been introduced along the way.

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Democracy is spreading across the world. Democracy is only possible with easy access to information and good communications. And technology is a way of facilitating communications.

The growth of this kind of stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of rank ignorance. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.

The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they're misinformed.

A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one activist who says they are dangerous looks "balanced," but in reality that is ridiculously skewed, because nearly nine out of ten scientists think GMOs are safe for consumption. At some point, in the midst of all the bickering, the public simply gives up and goes back to relying on simpler sources of information, even if it is a meme on Facebook.

The voters lack the information—or the interest—to develop a coherent view of politics beyond a general party identification, and this reality plays itself out regularly in U.S. elections.

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In

The resulting flood of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that actually leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It's an old saying, but it's true: it ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you do know that ain't so.

There aren't enough pages in this or any other book to catalog the amount of bad information on the Internet. Miracle cures, conspiracy theories, faked documents, misattributed quotes—all of these and more are the crabgrass and weeds that have rapidly overgrown a global garden of knowledge. The healthier but less sturdy grasses and flowers don't stand a chance.