Quotes about information
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Benjamin Disraeli photo

“We have been informed lately that ours will be the lot of Genoa, and Venice, and Holland. But...there is a great difference between the condition of England and those... We have during ages of prosperity created a nation of 34 millions—a nation who are enjoying, and have long enjoyed, the two greatest blessings of civil life—justice and liberty... [A] nation of that character is more calculated to create empires than to give them up, and I feel confident if England is true to herself; if the English people prove themselves worthy of their ancestors; if they possess still the courage and the determination of their forefathers, their honour will never be tarnished and their power will never diminish.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in the Guildhall, London (10 November 1878), quoted in The Times (11 November 1878), p. 10. William Gladstone had written in The North American Review: "It is [America] alone who, at a coming time, can, and probably will, wrest from us that commercial primacy...We have no more title against her than Venice, or Genoa, or Holland, has had against us" ('Kin beyond Sea', The North American Review Vol. 127, No. 264 (Sep. - Oct., 1878), p. 180)

Erving Goffman photo
Frank Wilczek photo
John Strachey photo
Lee Hyeon-seo photo
Henry VIII of England photo
Genesis P-Orridge photo
Richard Price photo

“Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance, persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind; and these evils will be excluded.”

Richard Price (1721–1791) Welsh nonconformist preacher and radical

Source: A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), p. 13

“All of us are responsible for the communication we make, for the information we share, for the control that we can exert over fake news by exposing it. All of us are to be witnesses of the truth: to go, to see and to share.”

Felix Femi Ajakaye (1962) Nigerian catholic priest

National Unrest: Address the nation now – Catholic Bishop tells Buhari https://dailypost.ng/2021/05/16/national-unrest-address-the-nation-now-catholic-bishop-tells-buhari/ (May 16, 2021)

George Stack photo
Céline Cousteau photo
George Eliot photo
John Mulaney photo
Walter Cronkite photo

“I worry that we're not getting enough of the news that we need to make informed judgments as citizens.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

“Money, first and foremost, is a medium of communication, conveying the information we call 'price.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Government control of the money supply is censorship, a violation of the First Amendment. Inflation is a lie.
"Some New Tactical Reflections".

Mary L. Trump photo

“I do feel that I have to do whatever I can to make sure that people are informed and understand exactly what's going on with this man.”

Mary L. Trump (1965) American clinical psychologist and author

Mary Trump's insider interview on 'most dangerous' President (Jul 26, 2020)

John Steinbeck photo
John Mulaney photo

“It's been proven that people will take information from a female voice, but they will only take a warning from a male voice. Now that's its own American gender nightmare that we don't have time to get into.”

John Mulaney (1982) American actor and comedian

John Mulaney Stand-Up Monologue - SNL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mSGwndFMp8, 03 March 2019

Joe Armstrong photo

“We need to know why things fails. If we want to improve our system, we need to put that information into that system into logs or something.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

Faults, Scaling and Erlang concurrency

“When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong.”

Source: The Heritage Universe, Resurgence (2002), Chapter 20, “Tally on Down” (p. 246)

Leopold II of Belgium photo

“At the moment, neither the Spanish, the Portuguese, nor the Dutch are willing to sell. I intend to discreetly inform myself if in Africa if there is nothing to do.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

All the King's Men' A search for the colonial ideas of some advisers and "accomplices" of Leopold II (1853-1892). (Hannes Vanhauwaert), 6. Baron Auguste Lambermont (1819-1905), A key figure in the background of early Belgian colonialism http://www.ethesis.net/leopold_II/leopold_II.htm#_ftn194 Leopold II in a key letter to Baron Lambermont after the failed colonial efforts in the Philippines and Tonkin, On August 22, 1875. AMBuZa. Papiers Lambermont, volume V, section 9, Leopold II to Baron Lambermont, August 22, 1875. For publication and photographic reproduction: ROEYKENS, A. Les débuts de l'œuvre africaine de Léopold II, 1875-1879, 95-96.
Quotes related to the Belgian Colonial Empire

Sheyene Gerardi photo
Barry Schwartz photo

“Many people operate as if there are two separate and equal sources of information—the self and others, where the number of others is irrelevant. The result is a “truly” false-consensus effect in the context of knowing one’s own plus a certain number of others’ responses.”

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 8, “Connecting Ourselves with Others, Without Recourse to a Good Story” (p. 148)

“Believing you’re good at something just because you do it—without any information that you’re doing it well—is indeed irrational.”

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 6, “Three Specific Irrationalities of Probabilistic Judgment” (p. 106)

China Miéville photo
James D. Watson photo
Scott Adams photo
Katherine Maher photo

“In my experience, it is perfectly possible to have opinions and also produce valuable, fact-based information for the world.”

Katherine Maher (1983) chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation

Source: Twitter https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1353456809424547840, (24 January 2021)

Ro Khanna photo

“Play hard and keep straight, and continue getting quality education, well informed, so that in any situation you have something positive to contribute.”

Grace Alele-Williams (1932–2022) mathematician

Source: https://www.youtube.com/0y3EdD7sKow Prof in an interview on words to the young and elderly.

Prayut Chan-o-cha photo

“Sometimes I feel a bit slighted. I am not sure whether you have heard me or listened to the information that we have sent out”

Prayut Chan-o-cha (1954) Thai military officer, junta chief, and politician

"Returning happiness to the people" speeches
Source: Thailand's leader will write soap operas to 'return happiness' to the people https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/29/thailands-leader-will-write-soap-operas-to-return-happiness-to-the-people (29 September 2014)

“I treat my audience like my friends. Whatever information I feel I would love to share with a friend, I will share the same on my social platforms, especially if it is content that will add value to my audience.”

Sisi Yemmie (1984) Nigerian Youtuber

Source: https://guardian.ng/life/spotlight/sisi-yemmie-the-inspirational-vlogger/ Sir yemmie speaking at an interview.

Benjamin Franklin photo

“Libraries ... will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the regions of ignorance that tyranny reigns.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Written by Henry Stuber as part of a biographical sketch of Franklin appended to a 1793 edition of Franklin's autobiography and sometimes reprinted with it in the 19th century. It is frequently misattributed to Franklin himself.
Misattributed

Jack Vance photo
Jay Samit photo
Alastair Reynolds photo

“Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.”

Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 43 (p. 438)

Tayari Jones photo

“When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It’s not a story. It’s not a character. I was at Harvard doing research on this subject, and I felt like I had a lot of information, but I had not yet found my story because I had to realize that I am a novelist. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a documentarian. I’m not an ethnographer. And I found the story, actually, through eavesdropping…”

Tayari Jones (1970) American writer

Source: On how she chose the topic of mass incarceration for her novel An American Marriage in “If I Can’t Cry, Nobody Cries: An Interview with Tayari Jones” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/08/cant-cry-nobody-cries-interview-tayari-jones/ in The Paris Review (2018 Feb 8)

Xiomara Castro photo
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

“A time came when the Catholics, having long relied on force, were compelled to appeal to opinion. That which had been defiantly acknowledged and defended required to be ingeniously explained away. The same motive which had justified the murder now prompted the lie. Men shrank from the conviction that the rulers and restorers of their Church had been murderers and abetters of murder, and that so much infamy had been coupled with so much zeal. They feared to say that the most monstrous of crimes had been solemnly approved at Rome, lest they should devote the Papacy to the execration of mankind. A swarm of facts were invented to meet the difficulty: The victims were insignificant in number; they were slain for no reason connected with religion; the Pope believed in the existence of the plot; the plot was a reality; the medal is fictitious; the massacre was a feint concerted with the Protestants themselves; the Pope rejoiced only when he heard that it was over. These things were repeated so often that they have been sometimes believed; and men have fallen into this way of speaking whose sincerity was unimpeachable, and who were not shaken in their religion by the errors or the vices of Popes. Möhler was pre-eminently such a man. In his lectures on the history of the Church, which were published only last year, he said that the Catholics, as such, took no part in the massacre; that no cardinal, bishop, or priest shared in the councils that prepared it; that Charles informed the Pope that a conspiracy had been discovered; and that Gregory made his thanksgiving only because the King's life was saved. Such things will cease to be written when men perceive that truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Source: 1860s, The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew (1869)

“The total lack of information is a kind of information in itself.”

Charles E. Gannon (1960) American novelist

Source: Trial by Fire (2014), Chapter 25 (p. 364)

Philip Arnold Subira Anyolo photo

“From the Christian point of view, we have an obligation to inform our people that God heals. But at the same time, He heals us through our understanding that we can protect ourselves from such illnesses.”

Philip Arnold Subira Anyolo (1956) Kenyan Roman Catholic archbishop

Bishops in Africa Call for Appropriate Measures as Cases of COVID-19 are Confirmed https://www.aciafrica.org/news/925/bishops-in-africa-call-for-appropriate-measures-as-cases-of-covid-19-are-confirmed (5 March 2020)

Kengo Kuma photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Maria Zakharova photo

“We have issued all our warnings both publicly and through bilateral channels. They [Sweden and Finland] know about it, they will have nothing to be surprised about, they were informed about everything, what will it lead to.”

Maria Zakharova (1975) Russian diplomat and journalist

Said about Russian reactions in case Finland and Sweden join NATO, quoted in "Russia warns Sweden, Finland about consequences of joining NATO" https://www.firstpost.com/world/russia-warns-sweden-finland-about-consequences-of-joining-nato-10577321.html, Firstpost, 20 April 2022

“When you got right down to it, every important decision in life was made with inadequate information.”

Source: Behrooz Wolf (aka The Proteus Trilogy), Proteus In The Underworld (1995), Chapter 14 (p. 190)

Roger Ailes photo

“People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed.”

Roger Ailes (1940–2017) Television executive

https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/18/roger-ailes-transformed-american-politics-contact-sport/

T.S. Eliot photo
Leonid Kuchma photo
Dolores Huerta photo

“Do you know that we were amazed to find out you can get all kinds of information about what's harmful to a pet, but you can't get any information about what's harmful to a farm worker?”

Dolores Huerta (1930) American labor leader

1974 speech, in Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 by Deborah Gillan Straub

Antony Blinken photo

“Media freedom plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told. The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world.”

Antony Blinken (1962) American government official and 71th U.S. Secretary of State

Quoted in British Court Trusts US to Protect Assange Even Though CIA Plotted to Kill Him https://truthout.org/articles/british-court-trusts-us-to-protect-assange-even-though-cia-plotted-to-kill-him/, Marjorie Cohn, Truthout (15 December 2021)

Aslan Maskhadov photo

“What reliable information can a traitor who has only completed two years of high-school education provide?”

Aslan Maskhadov (1951–2005) Chechen warlord

In a disparaging reference to pro-Moscow then Chechen First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov
"Chechen Leader Gives Exclusive Interview To RFE/RL" https://www.rferl.org/a/1057844.html (7 March 2005)

Chris Voss photo
Teal Swan photo