Quotes about information
page 11

“The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 128

Knowledge

“”Information science” emerges (a) when conceptual explorations, not directed towards immediate practical or technical ends, begin to take place, and (b) they are seen to be concerned with a definable area of interest [that of facilitating the transmission of information between people].”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 220; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

People, Science

“Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information.”

W. Willard Wirtz (1912–2010) American Secretary of Labor

Commencement address at University of Iowa. Commencement address, University of Iowa http://www.bartleby.com/63/48/2748.html, Time (June 19, 1965)

Communication, Universe

“I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.

Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.

Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter in answer to Solzhenitsyn's Harvard statement (21 June 1978), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 577
1970s

Life, Hostility, People, Travel

“It seems very odd to me that content would be removed based on an individual’s personal appreciation of relevance. If the article provides useful information and references, it should at least be valued for the efforts of the contributing individuals.”

Timothee Besset French software programmer

Quoted in Zachary Slater, "ioquake3 entry deleted from Wikipedia." http://ioquake3.org/2009/02/20/ioquake3-entry-deleted-from-wikipedia/ ioquake3 (2009-03-20).

Effort, Personality

“I think there is a danger with young people of being dependent in the sense that they don't acquire any identity or self-image of themselves as thinkers. They just go and look it up or they just chat with someone. In other words, relying on something rather than saying: "Okay, I've got the information, how do I create value from it?"”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

When asked "Have we become too reliant on computers?"
[Hamish, Mackintosh, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/1999/sep/23/onlinesupplement2, Deep thought, The Guardian, 1999-09-23, 2008-10-15]

People, Thinking, Sense, Dependency

“Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are representative of enterprise analysis tools that are growing in importance and are likely to become mandatory for ant business that continues to grow and evolve.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Source: Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison, 1982, p. 31

Business, Study

“Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck. […] If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Flight Behavior

The entomologist Ovid Byron to the journalist Tina Ultner, Flight Behavior, page 505-506 (ISBN 978-0-571-29081-9).
Flight Behavior (2012)

Thinking

“The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

“Serial Project #1, 1966,” Aspen 5/6 (Fall/Winter 1967)
Quotes of Sol Lewitt

Understanding

“For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.... the power of evolution.
But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language... Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Caroline Tisdall, 1979, p. 210; as cited in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 180
1970's

World, Understanding

“So the temples were attacked “all along the way” as the armies of Islam advanced; they were “robbed of their sculptural wealth”, “pulled down”, “laid waste”, “burnt with naptha”, “trodden under horse’s hoofs”, and “destroyed from their very foundations”, till “not a trace of them remained”. Mahmûd of Ghazni robbed and burnt down 1,000 temples at Mathura, and 10,000 in and around Kanauj. One of his successors, Ibrãhîm, demolished 1,000 temples each in Hindustan (Ganga-Yamuna Doab) and Malwa. Muhammad Ghûrî destroyed another 1,000 at Varanasi. Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak employed elephants for pulling down 1,000 temples in Delhi. “Alî I ‘Ãdil Shãh of Bijapur destroyed 200 to 300 temples in Karnataka. A sufi, Qãyim Shãh, destroyed 12 temples at Tiruchirapalli. Such exact or approximate counts, however, are available only in a few cases. Most of the time we are informed that “many strong temples which would have remained unshaken even by the trumpets blown on the Day of Judgment, were levelled with the ground when swept by the wind of Islãm.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Way, Strong, Time, Horse

“It is my firm belief that the only satisfactory test of economics is the ability to predict, and in crucial predictive situations such as reconversion after World War II, the settlement of the Korean War, the settlement of the Vietnam War, the abrupt economic policy switch of the Nixon Administration in August 1972, the oil shock of 1973 (forecast of a world-wide succession by LINK), the recession of 1990. In these crucial periods, econometric models outperformed other approaches, yet there is considerable room for improvement, and that is precisely what is being examined in development of high-frequency models that aim to forecast the economy, every week, every fortnight, or every month, depending on the degree of fineness of the information flow.”

Lawrence Klein (1920–2013) American economist

War, World, Success, Dependency

“Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. Your roughly 100 billion neurons are constantly generating electrical signals (“firing”), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There’s broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don’t understand how this works, so it’s fair to say that we humans don’t yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known.”

Max Tegmark (1967) Swedish-American cosmologist

Life Is A Braid In Spacetime http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime

Way, Communication, Mathematics, Understanding

“In a society where every third person is a communist and every second person is an informer, it is difficult to expect to win by democratic means.”

Vasil Bykaŭ (1924–2003) Belarusian writer

about Belarusian society Вялікія словы на вялікай мове http://dumki.org/quote/61 // dumki.org (in Belarusian)

Personality

“I would love to live in a world where the word “transgender” serves the same simple purpose — a mere sharing of information about my life experiences — but unfortunately, it doesn’t. On top of being a descriptor, the word “transgender” is also politically loaded. But that is not my, nor other trans people’s, fault. As discussed in the last section, there’s a long history of people hating, ostracizing, and criminalizing us, and much of this history took place before words like “transgender,” “transphobia,” and analogous terms even existed. In fact, those terms were created in response to that marginalization, not the other way around. And even if I were to relinquish my trans identity, those people would still exist and continue to discriminate against me for supposedly being a sinner, or freak, or deviant, or for being delusional, or whatever other rationales they might concoct in order to justify their bigotry.”

Julia Serano (1967) transsexual American writer, spoken-word performer, trans-bi activist, and biologist

Leftist Critiques of Identity Politics (2018)

Love, Life, Hate, People

“SPAN ID=A_human_being> A human being, then, is never dependent on his own experience alone for his information. Even in a primitive culture he can make use of the experience of his neighbors, friends, and relatives, which they communicate to him by means of language. Therefore, instead of remaining helpless because of the limitations of his own experience and knowledge, instead of having to discover what others have already discovered, instead of explporing the false traits they explored and repeating their errors, he can go on from where they left off.”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Language, that is to say, makes progress possible. 
Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Pooling of Knowledge, p. 12

Error, Communication, Knowledge, Dependency

“The sort of ill-informed armchair moralizing that pours from the permanently outraged, Daily Mail-reading mentality is one of the more revolting and frightening aspects of our society.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Reading

“The unavoidable spread of South Korean capital and information will put the North Korean government in a tight spot, to put it mildly.”

Andrei Lankov (1963) Russian academic

The Folly of an Inter-Korean Confederation (October 2015)

“The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, 1969
1960s

World, Law, Nature, Thinking

“Understanding how maps work and why maps work (or do not work) as representations in their own right and as prompts to further representations, and what it means for a map to work, are critical issues as we embark on a visual information age.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

(2004), p. v
How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995)

Age, Understanding

“One of the distinct features of XP is the lack of any documentation whatsoever, except for the code itself. This is a contraposition to the modeling techniques like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which strongly focus on documentation. XP takes an extreme position there, not even documenting the architecture of the system. Often, it is very difficult to extract the overall structure, behavior or interactions with the environment from the code. The code is a rather detailed and fragile representation of the system’s tasks. Even though the code contains all necessary information about the system, this information is often burdened with details and it is tedious to extract the aspects one is interested in. Therefore, it would be useful to have a more compact system representation. The UML does provide a number of notations that are suited for this purpose. However, the tools so far are not capable of supporting UML in such a manner that it can be well-integrated with the approach of Extreme Programming.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Executable Modeling with UML. A vision or a Nightmare (2002), p. 698

Behavior, Support

“Knowledge or no knowledge, the intelligence community is obliged to furnish estimates to military planners, even if they’re worthless and very possibly misleading. If you are one of those strange ducks trying to understand what this nuclear business is all about and read the “respectable” journals the CIA leaks information to, please don’t get the idea this makes you a more respectable arm chair analyst than anyone else.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Intelligence, Communication, Idea, Understanding

“People will resist information unless the price of not knowing it greatly exceeds the price of learning it.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Attributed to Mooers (1959) in Eugene Garfield (1997) "A Tribute To Calvin N. Mooers, A Pioneer Of Information Retrieval." The Scientist, Vol:11, #6, p. 9, March 17, 1997

People, Learning

“Random speculative pseudo information should be removed, unless it can be sourced.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-May/046440.html - Email to WikiEN-l, Tue May 16 20:30:15 UTC 2006 About falseness

“It isn't easy living with an author. I know this because my wife has informed me of this fact.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Nicholas Sparks, Prologue, p. 1
2000s, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004)

“If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that specialized subject. Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi.”

Larry Sanger (1968) American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects

"Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism" at kuro5hin (31 December 2004).

People, Books, Knowledge

“The third model regards mind as an information processing system. This is the model of mind subscribed to by cognitive psychologists and also to some extent by the ego psychologists. Since an acquisition of information entails maximization of negative entropy and complexity, this model of mind assumes mind to be an open system.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 102

“Earlier this evening, President Obama called to inform me that American forces killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda network that attacked America on September 11, 2001. I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude. This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks on the death of Osama bin Laden, May 5, 2011, The Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2011 http://web.archive.org/web/20110505081437/http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-death-obama-george-w-bush.html, 2010s, 2011

Love, Women, Men, People

“It excites world wonder in the Parliamentary countries that we should build a Chamber, starting afresh, which can only seat two-thirds of its Members. It is difficult to explain this to those who do not know our ways. They cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons, October 24, 1950 "Motion for Address in Reply" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/oct/24/motion-for-address-in-reply#column_2707. Post-war years (1945–1955)

World, Way, Understanding, Passion

“A word must become a friend or you will not understand it. Perhaps you do well to be cool and detached when you are seeking information, but I remind you of the wife who complained, 'When I ask John if he loves me, he thinks I am asking for information.”

Edward Coke (1552–1634) English lawyer and judge

Case of Swans, 7 Rep. 15, 17 (1592).

Love, Understanding, Thinking

“[Culture] Jammers are now mobilizing to repeat the tobacco story in many other areas of life. We’re going to take on the global automakers, the chemical companies, the food industries, the fashion corporations and the pop-culture marketers in a free-information environment …We want auto executives to feel just as squeezed and beleaguered as tobacco executives. We want them to have a hard time looking their kids in the eye and explaining exactly what they do for a living.”

Kalle Lasn (1942) Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist

Cultural Jam (2000)

Life, Food, Feeling, Fashion

“Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

Men

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

Michael Swanwick book Stations of the Tide

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 8, “Conversations in the Puzzle Palace” (p. 139)

“Yes, now we are at the starting-point again. Now we are at our real issue: that we understand ourselves first as sites of education, for information for democracy, for tree-part structure, and so on.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972

Education, Democracy, Understanding, Tree

“What’s really important is to have systemic changes. By that I mean, for example, putting into law that people have a right to access official information. Once freedom of information becomes part of the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats who are freedom of information officials have a vested interest in making sure that that law is there and that it actually works, because it kind of justifies their existence. One thing is to institutionalize rights to know.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012. Attributed, In the Media

People, Law, Freedom, Change

“There are three kinds of writing in economics: Greek-letter, up-and-down, and airport. Greek-letter writing formal, theoretical, mathematical is how professors communicate. Like any academic field, economics has its fair share of hacks and phonies, who use complicated language to hide the banality of their ideas; it also contains profound thinkers, who use the specialized language of the discipline as an efficient way to express deep insights. […] Up-and-down economics is what one encounters on the business pages of newspapers, or for that matter on TV. It is preoccupied with the latest news and the latest numbers, hence its name. […] Finally, airport economics is the language of economics bestsellers. These books are most prominently displayed at airport bookstores, where the delayed business traveler is likely to buy them. Most of these books predict disaster: a new great depression, the evisceration of our economy by Japanese multinationals, the collapse of our money. A minority have the opposite view, a boundless optimism: new technology or supply-side economics is about to lead us into an era of unprecedented economic progress. Whether pessimistic or optimistic, airport economics is usually fun, rarely well informed, and never serious.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Preface
The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990; 1994; 1997)

Money, Books, Way, Travel

“Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force, and about real and perceived biases, both within and outside of law enforcement. These are important debates. Every American should feel free to express an informed opinion—to protest peacefully, to convey frustration and even anger in a constructive way. That’s what makes our democracy great. Those conversations—as bumpy and uncomfortable as they can be—help us understand different perspectives, and better serve our communities. Of course, these are only conversations in the true sense of that word if we are willing not only to talk, but to listen, too.”

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

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Law, Way, Feeling, Democracy

“Mussolini…hoped Herr Hitler would see his way to postpone action [against Czechoslovakia] which the Chancellor had told Sir Horace Wilson was to be taken at 2 p. m. to-day for at least 24 hours so as to allow Signor Mussolini time to re-examine the situation and endeavour to find a peaceful settlement. In response, Herr Hitler has agreed to postpone mobilisation for 24 hours. Whatever views hon. Members may have had about Signor Mussolini in the past, I believe that everyone will welcome his gesture of being willing to work with us for peace in Europe. That is not all. I have something further to say to the House yet. I have now been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him at Munich to-morrow morning. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and M. Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted and I have no doubt M. Daladier will also accept. I need not say what my answer will be. [An HON. MEMBER: "Thank God for the Prime Minister!"] We are all patriots, and there can be no hon. Member of this House who did not feel his heart leap that the crisis has been once more postponed to give us once more an opportunity to try what reason and good will and discussion will do to settle a problem which is already within sight of settlement. Mr. Speaker, I cannot say any more. I am sure that the House will be ready to release me now to go and see what I can make of this last effort. Perhaps they may think it will be well, in view of this new development, that this Debate shall stand adjourned for a few days, when perhaps we may meet in happier circumstances.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1938/sep/28/prime-ministers-statement in the House of Commons (28 September 1938). Chamberlain received Hitler's invitation to Munich as he was ending his speech. Prime Minister

God, Peace, Hope, Way

“I believe the Internet is a great technical achievement. However, when it comes to the organization of information so that we can locate, select, and distinguish among bibliographic items for serious research, the Internet has a long way to go.”

Henriette Avram (1919–2006) American computer programmer and system analyst. She developed the MARC formatting used in libraries

Source: They Won! And did it ALA’s Way, 1997, p.76

Way

“Being open minded isn’t about accepting things mindlessly. Being open minded is about having the information and then making the best decisions you can. A chap called Ian Rowland who wrote a good book on cold-reading made the point that if you’re a chef and you think, ‘well I know if I put poison in this soup and give it to these 200 people it’s going to kill them but, hey, I’ll be open minded’, that’s not being open minded, that’s just being ignorant. That’s just not working with the information you’ve got. So we have information on things like placebo effect and information about cold-reading. These things exists – false memories and anecdotal [evidence], all those things that are important – and taking that on board is just about being able to make better decisions. That’s about being truly open minded. Ignoring them and putting them to one side in this pursuit of easy answers and ‘intuition is the be-all and end-all of truth’, that’s not being open minded at all. I think that’s very narrow minded and certainly to laugh at people who say that evidence is important, I think that’s hypocrisy of the worst kind, to call them narrow minded.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

People, Truth, Books, Thinking

“The area of scientific interest is… the study of the objectives, functions, structure, properties, behaviour, performance and effects of informative communication processes and information systems. To this study the name "information science" can legitimately be attached.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Communication, Study, Science

“While a small domain (consisting of fifty or fewer objects) can generally be analyzed as a unit, large domains must be partitioned to make the analysis a manageable task. To make such a partitioning, we take advantage of the fact that objects on an information model tend to fall into clusters: groups of objects that are interconnected with one another by many relationships. By contrast, relatively few relationships connect objects in different clusters.
When partitioning a domain, we divide the information model so that the clusters remain intact… Each section of the information model then becomes a separate subsystem. Note that when the information model is partitioned into subsystems, each object is assigned to exactly one subsystem.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: Modeling the World In Data (1988), p. 145; as cited in: The Object Agency, Inc. (1995) " A Comparison of Object-Oriented Development Methodologies http://www.ipipan.gda.pl/~marek/objects/TOA/OOMethod/mcr.html".

“Sometimes we see people persevering in the face of what seem to be insuperable odds. When that happens, I can't help but think that through their Plus Factor information has been conveyed to them that even they are unaware of.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Power Of The Plus Factor (1987)

People, Thinking, Help

“To inform, and, therefore to reconnoitre, this is the first and constant duty of the advanced guard.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 83

“Two views on the scope of technology have pervaded (and shaped) studies of technology, reflecting the different claims to generalizability that researchers have intended with their work. The one set of studies has focused on technology as "hardware," that is, the equipment, machines, and instruments that humans use in productive activities, whether industrial or informational devices.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 399

Study

“Statistics and information has become the lifeline in policy-making the world over. We must be at par with our neighboring countries, if not the world, to be equipped with vital and current information on world trade, events and trends.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2011/0819_escudero1.asp 2011

World, Country

“After refreshment St. George made a speech, in which he informed his audience that he had removed their direful scourge, at a great deal of trouble and inconvenience to himself, and now they weren't to go about grumbling and fancying they'd got grievances, because they hadn't. And they shouldn't be so fond of fights, because next time they might have to do the fighting themselves, which would not be the same thing at all.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Reluctant Dragon

Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon

Time, Fight

“Jobs: Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. We all brought to this a sort of “liberal arts” air, an attitude that we wanted to pull the best that we saw into this field. You don’t get that if you are very narrow.
Cringley: How does the Web affect the economy?
Jobs: We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time. The reason Federal Express won over its competitors was its package-tracking system. For the company to bring that package-tracking system onto the Web is phenomenal. I use it all the time to track my packages. It's incredibly great. Incredibly reassuring. And getting that information out of most companies is usually impossible.
But it's also incredibly difficult to give information. Take auto dealerships. So much money is spent on inventory—billions and billions of dollars. Inventory is not a good thing. Inventory ties up a ton of cash, it's open to vandalism, it becomes obsolete. It takes a tremendous amount of time to manage. And, usually, the car you want, in the color you want, isn't there anyway, so they've got to horse-trade around. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that inventory? Just have one white car to drive and maybe a laserdisc so you can look at the other colors. Then you order your car and you get it in a week.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds” (1995), “The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs Tells Us What Really Matters” https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/#5cb0fc8e6c3a, Forbes, Steve Denning, Nov 17, 2011, 1990s

Money, People, World, Art

“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean”

Najib Razak (1953) Malaysian politician

Quoted on BBC News, "Flight MH370 'crashed in south Indian Ocean' - Malaysia PM" http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26716572, March 24, 2014.

Sadness

“At the same time, through the passage of the Freedom of Information Bill and a crackdown on anomalies, we will fight corruption by ensuring that the government will be run on a simple principle—that discretion equals corruption. Minimize discretion and we will be able to minimize corruption; eliminate it and we will be able to eliminate corruption.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Freedom, Time, Fight

“Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389

Understanding, Effort

“Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat.”

David Mitchell (1969) English novelist

Paris Review

Parting, Housing

“The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production are not part of the current economic models…. an ecological tax reform would be strictly revenue neutral, shifting the tax burden from income taxes to "eco-taxes." …the taxes would be added to existing products, forms of energy, services, and materials, so that prices would better reflect true costs.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

Parting

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to William Charles Jarvis (28 September 1820)
1820s

People, Education, Exercises, Thinking

“He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.”

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Crossing the Line (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1958] 1960) p. 88

Nature

“Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community that understands that spirit and action are one.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

World, Communication, Understanding

“The sexuality of creativity – on that level, human interaction becomes less of an oppressive pyramid and more of a dance, an orgy, something that you can imagine being a bit of fun. It seems to work naturally, except when order is imposed upon it, from above, and then everything starts getting a bit screwed up. The information, the energy, starts to get messed up.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Imagination, Nature, Dance

“The Bible, as a revelation from God, was not designed to give us all the information we might desire, nor to solve all the questions about which the human soul is perplexed, but to impart enough to be a safe guide to the haven of eternal rest.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 28.

God, Soul, Question

“Our economy, society, and culture are built on interests, values, institutions, and systems of representation that, by and large, limit collective creativity, confiscate the harvest of information technology, and deviate our energy into self-destructive confrontation. This state of affairs must not be.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: End of Millennium, 1998, p. 379

“The coordination of information technology management presents a challenge to firms with dispersed IT practices. Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources.
Here we explore three major mechanisms for facilitating inter-unit coordination of IT management: structural design approaches, functional coordination modes, and computer-based communication systems. We define these various mechanisms and their interrelationships, and we discuss the relative costs and benefits associated with alternative coordination approaches.
To illustrate the cost-benefit tradeoffs of coordination approaches, we present a case study in which computer-based communication systems were used to support team-based coordination of IT management across dispersed business units. Our analysis reveals possibilities for future approaches to IT coordination in large, dispersed organizations.”

Gerardine DeSanctis (1954–2005) American organizational theorist

Gerardine DeSanctis and Brad M. Jackson (1994) "Coordination of information technology management: Team-based structures and computer-based communication systems." Journal of Management Information Systems Vol 10 (4). p. 85-110. Abstract

Communication, Business, Support, Study

“The stakeholder concept was originally defined as "those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist." The list of stakeholders originally included shareowners, employees, customers, suppliers, lenders and society. Stemming from the work of Igor Ansoff and Robert Stewart (in the planning department at Lockheed) and, later Marion Doscher and Stewart at SRI, the original approach served an important information function in the SRI corporate planning.”

R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic

R. Edward Freeman (2010) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. p. 32

Support

“She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 72

Way

“This article outlines a social information processing approach to explain job attitudes. In comparison with need-satisfaction and expectancy models of job attitudes and motivation, the social information processing perspective emphasizes the effects of context and the consequences of past choices, rather than individual predispositions and rational decision-making processes. When an individual develops statements about attitudes or needs, he or she uses social information - information about past behavior and about what others think. The process of attributing attitudes or needs from behavior is itself affected by commitment processes, by the saliency and relevance of information, and by the need to develop socially acceptable and legitimate rationalizations for actions. Both attitudes and need statements, as well as characterizations of jobs, are affected by informational social influence. The implications of the social information processing perspective for organization development efforts and programs of job redesign are discussed.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

Source: A social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design. 1978, p. 224; Abstract

Behavior, Motivation, Thinking, Decision

“Entitle us to the Liberty of proving the Truth of the Papers, which in the Information are called false, malicious, seditious and scandalous.”

John Peter Zenger (1697–1746) American printer

"Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger", pg. 17

Truth, Falseness

“The government of Myanmar denied committing any atrocities against the Rohingyas, asserting that many widely reported incidents had been fabricated, but the media generally brushed aside these denials. Few news outlets reported that the conflict had intensified in the summer and fall of 2017 because of an August 2017 jihad attack on Myanmar police and border posts. And hardly any news reports informed the public about the roots of the conflict: the Rohingya Muslims had actually been waging jihad against the Buddhists of Myanmar for nearly two centuries… In 1942, the British armed the Rohingyas to fight the Japanese, but the Rohingyas instead turned their weapons on the Buddhists, destroying whole villages, as well as Buddhist monasteries. When the British withdrew that same year in the face of the Japanese advance, the Rohingyas set upon the Buddhists of Arakan in force, killing at least 20,000… But for the media, the crisis in Myanmar was simply a matter of “anti-Muslim bigotry”…”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

The history of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS (2018)

Fight, Summer

“The United States, as you point out, has been actually freer than most in terms of offering access to information. It doesn’t have to be this way. Openness is not the default in terms of how if you look back in time, or even around the world. We need to show how openness works better. That you end up with companies that thrive better. That you have, with standards, you have more competition that builds more jobs. That openness is a win.”

Brewster Kahle (1960) American computer engineer, founder of the Internet Archive

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode https://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14843408/transcript-internet-archive-founder-brewster-kahle-wayback-machine-recode-decode (March 8, 2017)

World, Way, Time

“Men are so unwilling to displease a Prince, that it is as dangerous to inform him right, as to serve him wrong.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Princes (their Rewards of Servants).
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Political Thoughts and Reflections

Men

“He knows the entire land, there is not a stain on him, he is blemishless, has vast administrative experience having served in various [c]abinets, and fulfilled his responsibilities to everyone's satisfaction, whether it was as the chief executive of the Delhi metropolitan council or as information and broadcasting minister or deputy prime minister. Advaniji rose from the ranks to become a mass leader, there's a world of difference between the two.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2009, "The nation is waiting for a strong, experienced leader", 2009

World

“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

Life, World, Question, Support

“I am a legend, you know, I have to tell you a story about reggies splatoon 2. After E3, I immediately go into interviews and other meetings. I get a phone call from my son, who is now 16 years old, telling me, "Dad, you're famous. You got all these things on the web!" And I'm, like, "You're kidding me!" I didn't know what was going on. And we had all these fansites and all this information floating around. They called it the Reggielution and they called me the Reggienator. It was pretty fun.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

Source: Youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=jRNn8eStfRM Commenting on his fanbase that arose following his appearance at E3 2004

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.”

Viola Spolin (1906–1994) American academic and acting theorist

Improvisation for the Theater 1963), page 4

People, Reality, Freedom, Memory

“What excites pleasure in me is the meeting and conversing with old friends. But it is very galling when my friends do not visit me because there is a biting wind, or the roads are muddy through the rain, or perhaps because they are sick. Then I feel isolated. Although I myself do not drink, yet I provide spirits for my friends, […]. In front of my house runs a great river, and there I can sit with my friends in the shadow of the lovely trees. […] When they come they drink and chat, just as they please, but our pleasure is in the conversation and not in the liquor. We do not discuss politics because we are so isolated here that our news is simply composed of rumors, and it would only be a waste of time to talk with untrustworthy information. We also never talk about other people's faults, because in this world nobody is wrong, and we should beware of backbiting. We do not wish to injure anyone, and therefore our conversation is of no consequence to anyone. We discuss human nature about which people know so little because they are too busy to study it.”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Variant translation by Lin Yutang: "When all my friends come together to my house, there are sixteen persons in all, but it is seldom that they all come. But except for rainy or stormy days, it is also seldom that none of them comes. Most of the days, we have six or seven persons in the house, and when they come, they do not immediately begin to think; they would take a sip when they feel like it and stop when they feel like it, for they regard the pleasure as consisting in the conversation, and not in the wine. We do not talk about court politics, not only because it lies outside our proper occupation, but also because at such a distance most of the news is based upon hearsay; hearsay news is mere rumour, and to discuss rumours would be a waste of our saliva. We also do not talk about people's faults, for people have no faults, and we should not malign them. We do not say things to shock people and no one is shocked; on the other hand, we do wish people to understand what we say, but people still don't understand what we say. For such things as we talk about lie in the depths of the human heart, and the people of the world are too busy to hear them." (The Importance of Living, 1937; pp. 218–219)
Preface to Water Margin

Love, People, Pleasure, World

“Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. … The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

"Age of Ignorance" New York Review of Books, March 20, 2012 http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/03/20/age-of-ignorance/

Truth, Lie, Education, Democracy

“One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity…We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world”

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead (1995)

World, Problem, Help

“̆̽The argument of the social theory developed in this book [works] out the idea that each imaginative and institutional form of society represents an attempt to freeze, into a particular mold, the more fluid experiences of practical and passionate relationship characterizing the immediate, relatively unreflective, uninterpreted, and undisciplined life of personality. The dogmas and arrangements inform this life and alter it. But they do not completely overcome its recalcitrance or determine its inner nature. The visionary impulse in politics draws much of its persuasive force from the appeal to this defiant experience.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 467

Life, Books, Imagination, Idea

“The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 97

People

“What I say in the book is that rather than it being the death of journalism, this whole deluge of information, it to me marks a time when journalism can really come into its own, because as we’re drowning in information, the whole point of a journalist is to signpost what’s important and then to verify whether or not it’s true.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, Chatham House Talk (September 28, 2011)

Death, Books, Time

“Certain information is required for adequate role performance, that is, in order for a person to conform to the role expectations held by members of his role set.”

Robert L. Kahn (1918–2019) American psychologist

Source: Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity, 1964, p. 22-23

Personality

“He was the more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations. He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience.

On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Thinking, Solitude, Study

“An organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 8

Problem, Personality

“Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.
Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

tracking with closeups (32) “The Cool and Detached View“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Imagination, Sense, Christ

“Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent—power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

“This book is intended as an exploratory sketch of a revolutionary scientific perspective and conceptual framework as it might be applied to sociocultural systems. This point of view and still developing framework, as interpreted here, stems from the General Systems Research movement and the now closely allied fields of Cybernetics and information or communication theory.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. vii.

Books, Communication

“I do not see any sense in continuing to skirmish on a battlefield where I can never hope to win. The Cambridge system is effectively designed to prevent one ever establishing a directed policy — key decisions can be upset by ill-informed and politically motivated committees. To be effective in this system one must for ever be watching one's colleagues, almost like a Robespierre spy system. If one does so, then of course little time is left for any real science.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

As quoted by Bernard Lovell in Hoyle's obituary in The Guardian (23 August 2001) http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,540961,00.html

Hope, Motivation, Decision, Sense

“Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence. The body weighs just as much as before, the only properties it loses at the moment of death are potential properties. So also all we can assert concerning the vital principle is that it no longer animates that material organism: we cannot safely make further assertion regarding it, or maintain its activity or inactivity without further information.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, pp. 296–297 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=338 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Death, Soul, Animals

“The essence of cybernetic organizations is that they are self-controlling, self-maintaining, self-realizing. Indeed, cybernetics has been characterized as the “science of effective organization,” in just these terms.
But the word “cybernetics” conjures, in the minds of an apparently great number of people, visions of computerized information networks, closed loop systems, and robotized man-surrogates, such as “artorgas” and “cyborgs.””

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Visions of Cybernetic Organizations (1972)

People, Science

“The causes of Jewish renaissance and pluralism inform much of my work. My goal is to build a Jewish future by working to form a knowledgeable, proud and welcoming Jewish community throughout the world.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

Giving Pledge.

World, Communication, Knowledge, Future

“The most important thing was the notion of information presentation and the notion of the integration of the audience into the information. One sees oneself exiting form the elevator. If one stands there for 8 seconds, one sees oneself entering the gallery from the elevator again. Now at the same time one is apt to be seeing oneself standing there watching Wipe Cycle. You can watch yourself live watching yourself 8 seconds ago, watching yourself 16 seconds ago, eventually feeling free enough to interact with this matrix realizing one's own potential as an actor.”

Ira Schneider (1939) American artist

Ira Schneider (1969), , Arts Magazine, Vol. 44, p. 21; As cited in: David Antin. Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. 2012, p. 81-82: On the Wipe Cycle

Feeling, Time

“Loved once for ever loved: how surely sounds
This gospel to me since I learned to list
Truth from thy lips, mine own evangelist.
What thought presumes to set now any bounds
To Love whose being informs us and surrounds?”

John Barlas (1860–1914) British writer

XXIII."Loved once for ever loved: how surely sounds" Love Sonnets http://www.sonnets.org/love-sonnets.htm (1889)

Love, Truth, Learning

“The reason why so few persons are agreeable in conversation is that each thinks more of what he desires to say, than of what the others say, and that we make bad listeners when we want to speak. Yet it is necessary to listen to those who talk, we should give them the time they want, and let them say even senseless things; never contradict or interrupt them; on the contrary, we should enter into their mind and taste, illustrate their meaning, praise anything they say that deserves praise, and let them see we praise more from our choice than from agreement with them. To please others we should talk on subjects they like and that interest them, avoid disputes upon indifferent matters, seldom ask questions, and never let them see that we pretend to be better informed than they are.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), V. On Conversation

Question, Thinking, Time, Personality

“Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.”

Merton Miller (1923–2000) American economist

Source: Investment Gurus: A Road Map to Wealth from the World's Best Money Managers. 1999, p. 269.

People, Thinking

“I don't give a damn what the President of the United States wants to do or what anybody else wants to do. We will not waterboard; we will not torture… We will not torture people… It doesn't work, my friends. It doesn't work. If you inflict enough pain on somebody long enough, they're going to tell you whatever they think you want to hear to have it stopped… There are accomplished interrogators who can gain the confidence of the suspect and gain all the information that they could possibly want… My God, what does it say about America if we're going to inflict torture on people? It makes it hard for us to make the argument about the moral superiority of our way of our government and our way of life.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Regarding U.S. president-elect Donald J. Trump's intention to reintroduce the usage of torture by U.S. authorities, as quoted in "John McCain attacks Donald Trump's torture stance" https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10154266695396939/ (21 November 2016), Channel 4 News 2010s, 2016

Life, God, Pain, People

“Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down to us more than a century ago by a handful of European economists — Alfred Marshall in England and a few of his contemporaries on the continent. It is an understanding based squarely upon the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations, so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was roughly valid for the bulk-processing, smokestack economy of Marshall’s day. And it still thrives in today’s economics textbooks. But steadily and continuously in this century, Western economies have undergone a transformation from bulk - material manufacturing to design and use of technology — from processing of resources to processing of information, from application of raw energy to application of ideas. As this shift has occurred, the underlying mechanisms that determine economic behavior have shifted from ones of diminishing to ones of increasing returns.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Arthur, W. Brian. "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business." Harvard business review 74.4 (1996): p. 100

Behavior, Idea, Understanding, Business

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money, People, Secret, World

“He sidesteps the rise in the funding of Persian and Arabic by the secular Indian government and by foreign sponsors, and the concurrent dramatic decline in Sanskrit funding. He does not expose the downsizing and dismantling of the institutions, both formal and informal, on which Sanskrit and sanskriti have traditionally thrived. Pollock is careful not to implicate the non-Hindu forces that have wreaked havoc against Sanskrit.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

“The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges. Harangues from a rostrum would be a bad substitute for the conversational style in which so much of our business is done. But the conversational style requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency. There should be a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House. … It has a collective personality which enjoys the regard of the public, and which imposes itself upon the conduct not only of individual Members but of parties.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_403. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Business, Sense, Housing, Personality

“Our profession is concerned with three "aspects of the world". First, how people behave when they feel a need for information; second, characteristics of documentary information that constrain how we can manipulate it; and third, characteristics of the physical media that carry the information, whether they be static books or dynamic electronic networks.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 27.

People, Books, World, Feeling