Information

Information is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the person receiving it.

Sourced

• 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.
  • Jean Baudrillard French semiologist. Cool Memories, Ch. 5 (1987, trans. 1990)

• Wisdom is dead. Long live information.
  • Mason Cooley (1927-2002), American academic and aphorist. City Aphorisms (1984)

• Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.
  • Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911), American author. The Technique of Rest, Ch. 2 (1892)

• Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
  • Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 18th April 1775.

• When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
  • Ursela K. Le Guin (b. 1929), American Science Fiction author. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ch. 3 (1969)

• 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.
  • Herbert Simon, Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

• Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
  • Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Sir Robert Chiltern, in An Ideal Husband, Act 1.

• 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.
  • Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, Sander Duivestein, Me the media: rise of the conversation society, VINT editions (research institute of Sogeti), 2009, p.270.

Unsourced

• Information is the currency of democracy.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.
  • Mark Crispin Miller

• We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything.
  • Thomas Alva Edison

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

• Information is power. But it is what you do with it that either makes you great or diminishes you.
  • Anonymous

• If you don’t know what you’re looking at, how do you find out what it is? If you can’t find out what it is, how do you know what you’re looking at?
  • Thiddlededum & Twiddlededee

• To know all things is not permitted.
  • Horace

• The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
  • Jean Rostand

• Information is like a pearl, the tosser tosses it when he feels the urge.
  • Swami Raj