“We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.”

— Mario Bunge

Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction, 2001, p. 20.
2000s

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Mario Bunge 10

Argentine philosopher and physicist 1919

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“I have always found it a little strange that the majority of schools are utilizing filters. It seems to me that this is the environment where filters would not be used because the students are so carefully monitored, the activities in which they engage all go toward the same goals of education, and this is the very place where young people should be learning about information and its uses, in other words, where they should be learning information literacy.A recent National Research Center report, commissioned by Congress, clearly stated that information and media literacy are the most important things we can teach our children in order to truly protect them. Instead of placing barriers around the swimming pool, we must teach children to swim. We must teach children to find and use accurate information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"Children's Internet Protection Act" http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/washtech_policy060302.htm by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post (June 3, 2002 )

“Perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn from information history is that information provision has been and must be closely related to information need, and that the information sources we provide must be closely matched to the tasks being undertaken by the community served.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246.

“Behaviorists tell us that we tend to overweight and overreact to the most recently received information. If we do, we will find that the information that we thought was so important becomes tempered, and reduced in significance, by new and related information that follows.”

Robert Haugen (1942–2013) American economist

Source: The Inefficient Stock Market - What Pays Off And Why (1999), Chapter 12, The Forces behind the Technical Payoffs to Price History, p. 121

“We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.”

Warren Bennis (1925–2014) American leadership expert

Warren G. Bennis (1990) Why leaders can't lead: the unconscious conspiracy continues. p. 143
1990s

“Without complete and accurate data, we are left with 'ideological thunderbolts'. And that helps spark unrest and distrust and does not help us get better. Because we must get better, I intend for the FBI to be a leader in urging departments around this country to give us the facts we need for an informed discussion, the facts all of us need, to help us make sound policy and sound decisions with that information.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

“Albert Einstein quipped that “everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open.” Although we may not have the complete knowledge or we may be bombarded with contradictory information, we can still make informed decisions based on wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

“We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 9

“The true potential of an augmented life is revealed when it provides us with the information we need, at exactly the right time and place.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

“The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 4; as cited in: Melanie Feinberg (2007) "Beyond information retrieval"

“The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

As quoted in "Humanity will survive information deluge — Sir Arthur C Clarke" in OneWorld South Asia (5 December 2003) http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/74591/1
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

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