Information

"Der eigentliche, totale Krieg ist zu einem Informationskrieg geworden."

""Die Antwort auf unsere behauptete oder tatsächliche Orientierungslosigkeit ist Bildung"

"Die Information hat in den letzten vierzig Jahren im allgemeinen Sprachgebrauch die erstaunliche Wandlung vom Aschenputtel zur Prinzessin erfahren."

"Information ist nicht Wissen, Wissen ist nicht Weisheit, Weisheit ist nicht Wahrheit, Wahrheit ist nicht Schönheit, Schönheit ist nicht Liebe, Liebe ist nicht Musik, Musik ist das Beste."

"Planung erfordert eine Vielzahl von Einzelinformationen."

"Und wenn du noch so oft an ihre Türen klopfst, die Natur wird nie erschöpfend Auskunft geben."

"Wir sind heute zu sehr über alles informiert, um daraus noch klug werden zu können."

"Wo ist die Weisheit, die wir im Wissen verloren haben? Wo ist das Wissen, das wir in der Information verloren haben?"

"Der Bürger wird von mehr Informationen durch mehr Medien belagert als je zuvor, und doch erreichen ihn Informationen, die ihn als Bürger betreffen, oft nicht."

"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise."

"In 2007, for the first time ever, more information was generated in one year than had been produced in the entire previous five thousand years - the period since the invention of writing."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use."

"Information is not a substance or concrete entity but rather a relationship between sets or ensembles of structured variety."

"... we simply try to give you all of the information about our businesses, in a large general way, that Charlie and I would want if our positions were reversed. ... The facts are out about what we do."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"Wisdom is dead. Long live information."

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

"The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."

"people cannot take action if they don't have accurate information."

"Information is not lost in black holes, but it is not returned in a useful way. It is like burning an encyclopaedia. Information is not lost, but it is very hard to read."

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information."

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

"It used to be said that information is power. As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the board of the New York Times Co., rightly says, "Information is now ubiquitous. Power is understanding.""

"There's no going back, and there's no hiding the information. So let everyone have it."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled. As it turns out, after the first 50,000-year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up—between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled. As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point sometime around 2015 where human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam."

"Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?"

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

"Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists."

"You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information."

"Data, seeming facts, apparent asso­ciations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all."

"Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society."

"Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune."