Quotes about information
page 8

“The free exchange of opinion and information is the very lifeblood of the society to which you owe everything you have. It's the oxygen that gives us clarity and strength. Restricting it is like closing down synapses in the collective brain. It's an act of sabotage and nobody has the right to do it any more than they have the right to arbitrarily ration water or air. No judge, no politician, no police officer and certainly no braying mob of sanctimonious, privileged, middle-class, left-wing, students who think they know best for everyone.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"A word to left-wing students" (11 July 11 2013) https://youtube.com/watch?v=85q6BOnwIAQ 2013

Thinking, Water

“Countries of Europe, especially Germany and Italy, will be interested in sharing information from this attack, as they face similar threats from Muslim extremists. France, the European Union and Interpol will share information, and given the ability of the terrorists to move freely through Europe, this passing of information will be critical. The passport-free Schengen Area allows for movement through 26 countries in Europe on the motorways and autobahns, so while initially this is an attack on France, these terrorists are a threat to all of Europe.”

Mark Hertling (1953) United States Army general

As quoted in. "What videos reveal about Paris killers" http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/07/opinion/hertling-paris-attack/index.html, CNN, 7 January 2015

Country

“TF: At which point did you stop being celibate, why and who with?
M: I don't see how anyone would benefit from seeing that kind of information in print. Least of all me.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From "The Face Q&A", The Face (November 1999).
In interviews etc., About love

“When a community has sufficiently advanced so that its government begins to take on that of the nature of a republic, the processes of education become even more important, but the method is necessarily reversed. It is all the more necessary under a system of free government that the people should be enlightened, that they should be correctly informed, than it is under an absolute government that they should be ignorant. Under a republic the institutions of learning, while bound by the constitution and laws, are in no way subservient to the government. The principles which they enunciate do not depend for their authority upon whether they square with the wish of the ruling dynasty, but whether they square with the everlasting truth. Under these conditions the press, which had before been made an instrument for concealing or perverting the facts, must be made an instrument for their true representation and their sound and logical interpretation. From the position of a mere organ, constantly bound to servitude, public prints rise to a dignity, not only of independence, but of a great educational and enlightening factor. They attain new powers, which it is almost impossible to measure, and become charged with commensurate responsibilities.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

People, Truth, Education, Law

“An information retrieval system is therefore defined here as any device which aids access to documents specified by subject, and the operations associated with it. The documents can be books, journals, reports, atlases, or other records of thought, or any parts of such records—articles, chapters, sections, tables, diagrams, or even particular words. The retrieval devices can range from a bare list of contents to a large digital computer and its accessories. The operations can range from simple visual scanning to the most detailed programming.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959), p. 1275.

Books, Parting

“Citizens around the world have long declared a desire to be trusted with the formation of their own opinions, and that can only come when they have access to the facts. This is the essence of the information war. Do we trust citizens to communicate freely and come to their own conclusions, or do we believe those in authority have a right to restrict and manipulate what we know? Do we hold to Enlightenment ideals of reason and the pursuit of truth no matter where that takes us, or put our faith in authority to make certain an uncertain world?”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page x.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

War, Truth, World, Faith

“…A government as large as the modern megastate cannot conceivably be controlled by a well-informed public, since it is literally impossible to be knowledgeable about even a fraction of the many complex matters modern governments are called upon to govern. … The attraction of free markets … is that they have self-correcting features that place far smaller demands on anyone’s knowledge than democracy does. Each person concerns herself with her own life and the system, supposedly, runs itself. Interpreted in this way, the literature on public ignorance could form the basis of the consequentialist argument the postwar free-market economists sought, but never found … against all government economic intervention: for even if it cannot be shown, on economic grounds, that every intervention hurts more than it helps, it might be shown, on political grounds, that by opening the door to helpful interventions, we begin sliding toward the unhelpful ones on a slope slippery with public ignorance.”

Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist) (1959) American political scientist

Source: “What’s wrong with Libertarianism”, p. 455

Life, Way, Democracy, Literature

“America is today without the necessary information upon which to proceed intelligently. Much of the propaganda essential to winning the war has made the ground look like a battlefield after a tank has passed over it ploughed deep but unfit for culture for some time to come. Nowhere is there a clear authoritative statement of the contribution of the various races as such to America. Nowhere is there, an analysis of what they have brought or can bring, and of all that material which we have not used. Nowhere is there information as to what they take or of what they want most from America. Tons of literature are printed and sent out daily by all kinds of agencies, with seldom a consultation with the foreigner as to how it fits the needs of his race. We ignore in most racial meetings the knowledge which is there outlined, and violate very nearly every sound principle of race psychology. We get as a result the minds of the newcomers but not their hearts; their respectful attention but not their conversion. We get their cash contributions for American war activities and charities, but we do not succeed in creating in them the desire to stay here permanently.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

War, Intelligence, Literature, Knowledge

“They [the government] cannot stop people from communicating freely, to get information and to express themselves. When they do that, this nation is not a right place to live. They sacrifice generations of people’s opportunities. This is a crime.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: The Dissident, 2011

People, Communication

“There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (…), and a random one (…). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 142

Sense

“The thing that worries me about the computer age is the fact that people know so much about you. It's an incredible invasion of privacy. And no matter where you are in the world people can monitor you if you're using your credit card. I heard this weird rumor on the Internet about how the military is funding this great big research project and basically, they believe that in the future, the balance of power won't be determined by who has the most nuclear weapons, but by who has all the information. I'm not afraid of being taken over by computers though, because the thing is, computers cannot resist. You can always smash 'em up, and they're totally defenseless. All we need are more people with hammers.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://radiohead1.tripod.com/band/thomquotes.htm

People, Age, World, Future

“We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn’t arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along…”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, p. 125
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Waiting

“Historically, most societies have been heavily skewed in favor of the power pole, and most of history— especially modern history— can be seen as a struggle toward the authority pole, that is, toward the institutionalization of a process of informed, consensual self-determination of the whole, which we call "democracy."”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 186.

Democracy, History

“Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.”

David Marr (1945–1980) British neuroscientist and psychologist

as cited in Steven Yantis (2001) Visual Perception: Essential Readings, p. 117.
Vision, 1982

World

“As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 24, Bits, Bucks, Hits and Nuts, Information theory beyond Shannon, p. 221

“Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Interview with Glenn Greenwald, 6 June 2013, Part 1

Democracy, Intelligence, Lying

“Although Black feminism and some currents of postmodernist theory share some common assumptions and common language, these are overshadowed by key differences that make them two distinct approaches to combatting oppression. Thus the concept of intersectionality has two different political foundations--one informed primarily by Black feminism and the other by postmodernism. More recent evolution of the post-structuralist approach to identity politics and intersectionality, which has a strong influence over today's generation of activists, places an enormous emphasis on changing individual behavior as the most effective way to combat oppression. This has given rise to the idea of individuals "calling out" interpersonal acts of perceived oppression as a crucial political act. More generally, intersectionality in postmodern terms, even among those who have no idea what postmodernism is.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Way, Behavior, Idea, Strong

“It is only from the perspective of the outlaw … that we are able to see that mythically informed normality is a form of mass hypnosis.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 99

“That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 8, “Of Models, Moonlight, Mystery, and Authority” (p. 197)

“We resist hegemonic dominance of feminist thought by insisting that it is a theory in the making, that we must necessarily criticize, question, re-examine, and explore new possibilities. My persistent critique has been informed by my status as a member of an oppressed group, experience of sexist exploitation and discrimination, and the sense that prevailing feminist analysis has not been the force shaping my feminist consciousness. This is true for many women. There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the feminist movement created an awareness that they could and should. My awareness of feminist struggle was stimulated by social circumstance. Growing up in a Southern, black, father-dominated, working class household, I experienced (as did my mother, my sisters, and my brother) varying degrees of patriarchal tyranny and it made me angry-it made us all angry. Anger led me to question the politics of male dominance and enabled me to resist sexist socialization. Frequently, white feminists act as if black women did not know sexist oppression existed until they voiced feminist sentiment. They believe they are providing black women with "the" analysis and "the" program for liberation. They do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis). These black women observed white feminist focus on male tyranny and women's oppression as if it were a "new" revelation and felt such a focus had little impact on their lives. To them it was just another indication of the privileged living conditions of middle and upper class white women that they would need a theory to inform them that they were "oppressed." The implication being that people who are truly oppressed know it even though they may not be engaged in organized resistance or are unable to articulate in written form the nature of their oppression. These black women saw nothing liberatory in party line analyses of women's oppression. Neither the fact that black women have not organized collectively in huge numbers around the issues of "feminism" (many of us do not know or use the term) nor the fact that we have not had access to the machinery of power that would allow us to share our analyses or theories about gender with the American public negate its presence in our lives or place us in a position of dependency in relationship to those white and non-white feminists who address a larger audience.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 10.

Women, People, Imagination, Understanding

“The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.”

Carl Bernstein (1944) American journalist

An A-Z of cultural terms, The Guardian (1992)

Fear, Question, Business, Speed

“It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Collaborations with others, Science Order, and Creativity (1987)

Way, Idea, Nature

“Let's consider first Hayek's claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.
It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism's great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.
This isn't to say that virtue makes no difference to what returns one may expect for one's productive contributions. The exercise of prudence and foresight in laying out one's production and investment plans, and diligence in carrying them out, generally improves one's odds. But sheer dumb luck is also, ineradicably, a prominent factor determining free market returns. And nobody deserves what comes to them by sheer luck.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

People, Way, Behavior, Exercises

“Is terrorism the greatest threat to our country, or a recession? I suggest to you today that the quickest, most direct way to ruin a democracy is to poison the information.”

Scott Pelley (1957) American television journalist, news anchor

21 November 2016 Speech at Arizona State University upon receiving the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism award. CBS News Anchor Scott Pelley Receives Cronkite Award from ASU' https://cronkite.asu.edu/news-and-events/news/cbs-news-anchor-scott-pelley-receives-cronkite-award-asu-0,

Way, Democracy, Country

“Despite a decade or more of restructuring and downsizing, many U. S. companies are still unprepared to operate in the 1990s. In a time of rapidly changing technologies and ever-shorter product life cycles, product development often proceeds at a glacial pace. In an age of the customer, order fulfillment has high error rates and customer inquiries go unanswered for weeks. In a period when asset utilization is critical, inventory levels exceed many months of demand.
The usual methods for boosting performance — process rationalization and automation — haven’t yielded the dramatic improvements companies need. In particular, heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results — largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business. They leave the existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up.
p. 104; The two lead paragraphs”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

"Reengineering work: don't automate, obliterate," 1990

Life, Age, Disappointment, Way

“We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

“Imagine you are doing a woodworking project, perhaps making a table. Fortunately, you needn't make all the parts yourself. Some are standard sizes and shapes - lengths of two by four, for instance - available at any lumberyard. Some have already been designed and made by other people - drawer pulls and turned legs. All you have to do is fit them into the places you left for them, knowing they were available. You want to make an argument instead of a table. You have created some of the argument yourself, perhaps on the basis of new data or information you have collected. But you needn't invent the whole thing. Other people have worked on your problems or problems related to it, and have made some of the pieces you need. You just have to fit them in where they belong. Like the woodworker, you leave space, when you make your portion of the argument, for the other parts you know you can get. You do that, that is, if you know that they are there to use. And that's one good reason to know the literature: so that you will know the pieces are available and not waste time doing what has already been done.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 141-142 as cited in: Using the Literature to Formulate your Research Question http://www.utexas.edu/research/pair/usingthe.htm at utexas.edu. Accessed Feb 19, 2013.

People, Imagination, Literature, Problem

“If you want to get to know a character, learn about their interests, goals or desires, their butt is probably not going to give you that information.”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

Strategic Butt Coverings (Jan 19, 2016)
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (Feminist Frequency, 2013 - 2015)

Learning

“The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.”

Jerry Pournelle book Lucifer's Hammer

Lucifer's Hammer (1985)

“However, in all honesty, I must say that one must essentially forget that all proofs are transcribed in this formal language. In order to think productively, one must use all the intuitive and informal methods of reasoning at one's disposal. At the very end one must check that no errors have been committed; but in practice set theory is treated as any other branch of mathematics. The reason that we can do this is that we will never speak about proofs but only about models.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

p. 1078 of "The discovery of forcing." http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ykhomski/ST2013/The%20Discovery%20of%20Forcing.pdf Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics 32, no. 4 (2002): 1071–1100.

Error, Mathematics, Thinking, Forgetting

“We've watched the Homo Sapiens interest group since the first appearance of the Blight. Where is this "Earth" the humans claim to be from? "Half way around the galaxy," they say, and deep in the Slow Zone. Even their proximate origin, Nyjora, is conveniently in the Slowness. We see an alternative theory: Sometime, maybe further back than the last consistent archives, there was a battle between Powers. The blueprint for this "human race" was written, complete with communication interfaces. Long after the original contestants and their stories had vanished, this race happened to get in position where it could Transcend. And that Transcending was tailor-made, too, re-establishing the Power that had set the trap to begin with.We're not sure of the details, but a scenario such as this is inevitable. What we must do is also clear. Straumli Realm is at the heart of the Blight, obviously beyond all attack. But there are other human colonies. We ask the Net to help in identifying all of them. We ourselves are not a large civilization, but we would be happy to coordinate the information gathering, and the military action that is required to prevent the Blight's spread in the Middle Beyond. For nearly seventeen weeks, we've been calling for action. Had you listened in the beginning, a concerted strike might have been sufficient to destroy the Straumli Realm. Isn't the Fall of Relay enough to wake you up? Friends, if we act together we still have a chance.Death to vermin.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), p. 245.

Happiness, Way, Communication, Appearance

“The concept of communication includes all of those processes by which people influence one another… This definition is based on the premise that all actions and events have communicative aspects, as soon as they are perceived by a human being; it implies, furthermore, that such perception changes the information which an individual processes and therefor influences him.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 6 as cited in: Stewart L. Tubbs, Robert M. Carter (1978) Shared Experiences in Human Communication. p. 1

People, Communication, Change

“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

Wisdom, Idea, Knowledge, Decision

“Information is information, Faust. Knowledge is knowledge. I make no distinction between the high and the low.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 6, “Practical Designs” (p. 80)

Knowledge

““Time to get up,” he informed her. “Don’t you hear the Almighty bellowing in the living room?”
“What’s he saying?” Marsha murmured crossly.
“Nothing in particular. Repent or suffer eternal damnation. The usual tribal tub-thumping.””

Philip K. Dick book Eye in the Sky

Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 8 (p. 103)

Suffering, Time

“We want to provide as much information as we can, and say to our users: "It is all here. You make the choice."”

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

"A Library That Would Rather Block Than Offend" by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times (January 18, 1997)

“Knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it's intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone "memorizes" information (as less-aspiring test-bound students often do), then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

As cited in: Jeff A. Riley and Kemal A. Delic (2010) "Enterprise Knowledge Clouds". In: Handbook of Cloud Computing. Borko Furht, Armando Escalante ed. Springer 2010.
Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985, From Data to Wisdom, 1989

Knowledge

“I think [my experience] gave me—without I think ever romanticizing (because these were people you romanticize as somehow super people), it gave me a very deep and lasting respect for the common sense and the abilities of human beings, adults. At the same time, it increased my awareness of the importance of information and the challenge that that posed, therefore the challenge of education. And the great gap between what people need to know in order to protect their own self-interest and what they do know, which of course in some Platonic and other theories is filled in by those who believe that they know best, a view which as you know I’ve always greatly distrusted.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

People, Education, Thinking, Sense

“I have tried to show that psychiatric research can be empirical and experimental, controlled, and operational and not dependent on inferences, analogies, or anecdotes. Hypotheses can be derived which are testable. Theory is a different matter. At the present we rely heavily on psychoanalytic theory or on still poorly formulated and defined general systems theory, information theory, or transactional theory. To explain the depth and variety of the interrelationship of somatopsychosocial facets of the totality of human behavior in process requires a unified theory of human behavior which we have not yet even approached. Integration or synthesis of biological, psychological, and social theory is not enough.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Ginker (1964) as cited in: S. Nassir Ghaemi (2009) The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model. p. 24

Behavior, Dependency

“A field commander never has the information he needs. He has to go with his best hunch. The more information he has, the easier it is for him to win the battle.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

“Technology moves with terrifying speed. If the traffic rules are explicit and understandable, and accompanied by common-sense protective designs, this technology will be an incalculable boon to America, a shot in the arm to our international competitiveness, and a stimulus to our creative industries. If not, then the information superhighway, cyberspace, the Internet, call it what you will, technology will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property. The country will be the loser. Big time.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives on copyright immunities for ISPs. (7 February 1996)

Understanding, Sense, Time, Speed

“Companies are in the midst of a revolutionary transformation. Industrial age competition is shifting to information age competition. During the industrial age, from 1850 to about 1975, companies succeeded by how well they could capture the benefits from economies of scale and scope. Technology mattered, but, ultimately, success accrued to companies that could embed the new technology into physical assets that offered efficient, mass production of standard products.
During the industrial age, financial control systems were developed in companies, such as General Motors, DuPont, Matsushita, and General Electric, to facilitate and monitor efficient allocations of financial and physical capital. A summary financial measure such as return-on-capital employed (ROCE) could both direct a company’s internal capital to its most productive use and monitor the efficiency by which operating divisions used financial and physical capital to create value for shareholders.
The emergence of the information era, however, in the last decades of the twentieth century, made obsolete many of the fundamental assumptions of industrial age competition. No longer could companies gain sustainable competitive advantage by merely deploying new technology into physical assets rapidly, and by excellent management of financial assets and liabilities.”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2-3

Age, Success

“We’ve come up with ways to judge the quality of a product. The thing is that we’re just getting used to the idea that information is a product, and we have to come up with criteria on which to judge which information is worth paying attention to and taking seriously and which isn’t. So we have to think: is this information new? Is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Can I verify it? Who’s the source? If you’re a journalist you’re used to doing this as your job, but that’s going to become increasingly necessary for people online, because they just get hit with so much information, and if they don’t want to just sit there, manipulated by all different kinds of propaganda, they have to start getting tooled up on how to be a savvy information consumer.”

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, Way, Idea, Thinking

“I think of him as well intentioned, poorly informed, high status idiot.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

On his character in The Colbert Report, in an interview on 60 Minutes http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/27/60minutes/main1553506.shtml (30 April 2006)

Thinking

“My father has always used the confidential information extracted from people during auditing sessions to intimidate, threaten and coerce them to do what he wanted, which often meant getting them to give him money. My father routinely used false threats and auditing information particularly about crimes people had committed to extort money from them.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Affidavit for a US District Court

Money, People, Falseness

“It is wise not to confuse information and inspiration. The former is the result of studious application, the latter is what happens when you don't think about it.
Each has a role to play, but must not look to play the role of the other. Inspiration may be the bright tower in the clouds; information is the solid rock where the foundations are.”

John Howe (illustrator) (1957) Canadian illustrator

Source: John Howe : Fantasy Art Workshop (2007), p. 11

Thinking

“Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Family, Law, Question, Strong

“Privacy has currently become a hot button issue, but I recognized years ago that there was a problem with the government having access to too much information on the citizens without establishing probable cause before they gathered it. And I started pursuing that. There were 400 private and public institutions around this country that were trying to access drones for surveillance purposes. It was not to protect us from harm, it was not to protect us from terrorists. There was nothing in statute that described what drones could be used for, what kind of information they could gather, what they could with that information once they gathered it.”

Matt Rosendale (1960) Member of the Montana House of Representatives

An Exclusive Interview with Congressional Candidate Matt Rosendale http://www.freedomsdiscourse.com/2015/05/24/an-exclusive-interview-with-congressional-candidate-matt-rosendale/ (May 24, 2015)

Problem, Country

“The areas traditionally concerned with such systems are: publishing in all its ramification, librarianship, bibliography, documentation, record management, archives and the like. Systematic study of the activities in all these areas has lead to increased recognition of their common features. They are all concerned with information systems, and their study may include in the wider field of 'information science and technology' (as the Americans put it) or 'informatics”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

as Soviet writers would have it
Preface: second paragraph
Information Systems (1973)

Study, Science

“There are many situations in life, and particularly in the commercial world, where a man cannot by any diligence inform himself of the degree of credit which ought to be given to the persons with whom he deals; in which cases he must apply to those whose sources of intelligence enable them to give that information. The law of prudence leads him to apply to them, and the law of morality ought to induce them to give the information required.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Pasley v. Freeman (1789), 3 T. R. 51.

Life, World, Law, Intelligence

“After long and fruitless endeavors to effect the purposes of their mission and to obtain arrangements within the limits of their instructions, they concluded to sign such as could be obtained and to send them for consideration, candidly declaring to the other negotiators at the same time that they were acting against their instructions, and that their Government, therefore, could not be pledged for ratification….
Whether a regular army is to be raised, and to what extent, must depend on the information so shortly expected. In the mean time I have called on the States for quotas of militia, to be in readiness for present defense, and have, moreover, encouraged the acceptance of volunteers; and I am happy to inform you that these have offered themselves with great alacrity in every part of the Union. They are ordered to be organized and ready at a moment's warning to proceed on any service to which they may be called, and every preparation within the Executive powers has been made to insure us the benefit of early exertions.”

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

Thomas Jefferson's Seventh State of the Union Address (27 October 1807). Description of the negotiations and rejected treaty of James Monroe and William Pinkney with Britain over maritime rights, and subsequent negotiations over the British sinking of the American ship Chesapeake, leading to an American embargo (The Embargo Act).
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Happiness, Time, Parting, Dependency

“Over the last few decades these radical religious broadcasters, who have essentially taken control of the airwaves, have built a parallel information and entertainment service that is piped into tens of millions of American homes as a way of essentially indoctrinating listeners and viewers with this very frightening ideology.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

The Christian Right and the Rising Power of the Evangelical Political Movement http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/05/1429230

Way, Home

“Information theory, introducing the concept of information as a quantity measurable by an expression isomorphic to negative entropy in physics, and developing the principles of its transmission.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

“p. 651Abstract. Investigations of the function of consciousness in human information processing have focused mainly on two questions: (1) where does consciousness enter into the information processing sequence and (2) how does conscious processing differ from preconscious and unconscious processing. Input analysis is thought to be initially "preconscious," "pre-attentive," fast, involuntary, and automatic. This is followed by "conscious," "focal-attentive" analysis which is relatively slow, voluntary, and flexible. It is thought that simple, familiar stimuli can be identified preconsciously, but conscious processing is needed to identify complex, novel stimuli. Conscious processing has also been thought to be necessary for choice, learning and memory, and the organization of complex, novel responses, particularly those requiring planning, reflection, or creativity. The present target article reviews evidence that consciousness performs none of these functions. Consciousness nearly always results from focal-attentive processing (as a form of output) but does not itself enter into this or any other form of human information processing. This suggests that the term "conscious process" needs re-examination. Consciousness appears to be necessary in a variety of tasks because they require focal-attentive processing; if consciousness is absent, focal-attentive processing is absent. Viewed from a first-person perspective, however, conscious states are causally effective. First-person accounts are complementary to third-person accounts. Although they can be translated into third-person accounts, they cannot be reduced to them.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Is human information processing conscious?, 1991

Question, Learning, Appearance, Memory

“Throughout, we shall be exemplifying the thesis of D. M. MacKay: that quantity of information, as measured here, always corresponds to some quantity, i. e. intensity, of selection, either actual or imaginable”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 3: Regulation and control, p. 252

Imagination

“[Footnote:] Pliny the Elder described a Whale called "Balaena or Whirlpool, which is so long and broad as to take up more in length and breadth than two acres of ground." This brings up again the old question: Are the classics doomed? Our ancestors believed that four years of this sort of information would inevitably produce a President, or at least a Cabinet Member. It didn't seem to work out that way.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Whale
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Way, Question

“One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. It might seem, then, that all efforts to explain Zen are complete wastes of time. But that is not the attitude of Zen masters and students. For instance, Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be "triggers" which, though they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possibly be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that lead to enlightenment. But in general, the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.”

Douglas Hofstadter book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)

Truth, Way, Effort, Study

“Organizational design often focuses on structural alternatives such as matrix, decentralization, and divisionalization. However, control variables (e. g., reward structures, task characteristics, and information systems) offer a more flexible approach. The purpose of this paper is to explore these control variables for organizational design. This is accomplished by integration and testing of two perspectives, organization theory and economics, notably agency theory. The resulting hypotheses link task characteristics, information systems, and business uncertainty to behavior vs. outcome based control strategy. These hypothesized linkages are examined empirically in a field study of the compensation practices for retail salespeople in 54 stores. The findings are that task programmability is strongly related to the choice of compensation package. The amount of behavioral measurement, the cost of measuring outcomes, and the uncertainty of the business also affect compensation. The findings have management implications for the design of compensation and reward packages, performance evaluation systems, and control systems, in general. Such systems should explicitly consider the task, the information system in place to measure performance, and the riskiness of the business. More programmed tasks require behavior based controls while less programmed tasks require more elaborate information systems or outcome based controls.”

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt American economist

Source: "Control: Organizational and economic approaches," 1985, p. 134; Article abstract

Behavior, Business, Study

“The essence of the Vedas is a narrative on who the experiencing self is. Ordinary science informs us of the relationships between objects and also their transformations. But the Vedas say that this ordinary science leaves out the self who observes these objects.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

Interview The Hindu, 2014
Miscellaneous

Science

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Ismail Serageldin (1944) egyptian academic

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

Love, Books, Way, Search

“Lincoln had a wonderful faculty for understanding the topography of a country, and he was quite familiar with the one in which the army was about to operate; he carried a small chart in his pocket, on which were marked all the rivers and hills about Richmond, with the city itself, and the different points where General Lee had his forces posted, the lines of defense, and, in fact, all the information that a general of an army wanted. During our rides which were always within the lines he would stop and spread out his chart on his knees and point out to me what he would do if he were the general commanding, taking good care, at the same time, never to interfere in any way with General Grant, whom, I rather think, he considered the better strategist of the two.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 282

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Time

“Communication becomes the defining characteristic of homo sapiens; we are the species that speaks. We utter the words that create our world, and have learned to take our words and translate them into the ethereal play of zeros and ones, lay them out, at the speed of light, first on a wire, then a radio wave, and lately, on a beam of light, so that the voice, once constrained by mouth and ear, now straddles the entire planet in thirty millionths of a second, messages pinging back and forth, not unlike the meeting points of a synaptic gap, using photons as neurotransmitters, and each network router the equivalent of a synapic junction, deciding whether to activate or extinguish each message that crosses the continents, connected now in a seamless, endless web of knowledge, more than two billion pages, more than any one of us could ever read or know, the collected and collective intelligence of a species that seems to have made information the central mystery of culture, the project of civilization, and the goal of being.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

From the narration to Becoming Transhuman http://www.webearth.org/bt.pdf

World, Intelligence, Communication, Knowledge

“He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, World, Time, Reading

“He was treated like a traitor for 30 years, so he was conditioned to just shut up and be quiet. Every bit of information I got from him, I had to drag it out of him.”

Hugh Thompson, Jr. (1943–2006) United States helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War

Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf?/base/news-22/1136568553158920.xml&storylist=louisiana Quotes of others about Thompson

“is a process for encoding quantitative information.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Transforming qualitative information (1998), p. 4.

“No paper is more seminal for the fields of quantum foundations and quantum information than the 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) paper.”

Howard M. Wiseman (1968) Australian physicist

"Quantum discord is Bohr’s notion of non-mechanical disturbance introduced to counter the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen argument", Annals of Physics 338 (2013) 361–374

“Money, first and foremost, is a medium of communication, conveying the information we call 'price'. Government control of the money supply is censorship, a violation of the First Amendment. Inflation is a lie.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some New Tactical Reflections".

Money, Lie, Communication

“Getting information is only the beginning. Transparency in government must be accompanied by the public's right to be heard and to influence government policy. The first objective is to get the facts, for without facts we are powerless to oppose government decisions or bring about change. The next step is to open up the decision-making process so we finally have a government accountable to those it serves. This should be our right and not a privilege.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 8.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

Decision, Change

“If, then, faith so evidently surrounds us, why should it be so offensive? It is simply because faith is as essential to the spiritual realm as oxygen is to the natural realm. The professing atheist thinks that if he can get rid of any thought of faith he can get rid of Christianity. In trying to do so, he saws through the branch he is sitting on. His own faith in the erroneous information he has makes him think he is atheistic in his beliefs.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Faith, Nature, Thinking

“Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 228

Secret, World, Mountain, Nature

“I do not deny that most managers lack a good deal of information that they should have, but I do deny that this is the most important informational deficiency from which they suffer. It seems to me that they suffer more from an overabundance of irrelevant information.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Management misinformation systems, 1967, p. 147.

Suffering

“Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

Fractals : Form, chance and dimension (1977)

Mathematics

“From the sun-drenched south slopes of Gris, where grow the finest grapes this world has seen. Is mine an informed opinion, you are wondering? Most assuredly so, lass, since I hold a majority interest in said vineyards”

Steven Erikson book House of Chains

House of Chains (2002)

World, Sun

“If the syntax is good enough for the information, it should be good enough for the meta-information.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: XML and lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4917ba734ce860c4 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“I have received a question I have expected, 'Don't you deal with accidents?' Yes, I deal with accidents, just as Arp admits it all the time. And I admit it, too. But I like to have them under my command and not sign them because they are accidents. If it remains only accident then sign it 'accident' or 'fate' or 'the Lord', whatever you prefer. It's not you because you have not visioned it. You see visual formulation deals with vision, visual information and visual reaction. So I speak differently from all those who deliver themselves to uncontrolled accidents.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Fate, Question, Time

“It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.”

Gilbert Ryle book The Concept of Mind

Source: The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. II: Knowing How and Knowing That, (2) Intelligence and Intellect

Stupidity, Personality

“A viewpoint that gets at the heart of sociology because it sees the sociocultural system in terms of information and communication nets;”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Sociology and modern systems theory (1967)

Communication, Heart

“When I was informed by the police they had decided to charge me with treason … I was in a state of shock. That I have been found guilty of treason shocks me the more.”

Francis Minah (1929–1989) Sierra Leonean politician

Former Vice President Convicted Of Treason, Sentenced To Death, AP News, en-US, 2018-07-09 https://www.apnews.com/984b27b0479c90a4cb47a13106ad8120,

“The analogy with bibliographic classifications and thesauri is obvious… despite the differences, it is to be regretted that 'ontological engineers' make little or no reference to work in information science. As a consequence, they do not appear to draw at all on the rich experience of constructing knowledge schedules … or… developing concept lexicons.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 284; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Knowledge, Appearance, Science, Drawing

“All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to fill your head with information.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted by Mike Strickland, Director of Photographers at Walt Disney, Co. in Power Marketing for Wedding and Portrait Photographers (2004) by Mitche Graf, p. 19

People

“If a piece of information is wrong or misrepresented on Wikipedia, it affects the way the entire world sees that topic.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Mehrotra, Karishma. (March 26, 2014). "Universities 're-write' Wikipedia to fill holes, include women" http://college.usatoday.com/2014/03/26/universities-re-write-wikipedia-to-fill-holes-include-women/. USA Today.

World, Way

“Composition is a side issue. Its role in my selection of photographs is a negative one at best. By which I mean that the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content. And, on the other hand, composition always also has its own fortuitous rightness.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1964; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5 1960's

“At the center of market fundamentalism lies the general acceptance of the Walrasian general equilibrium model, or the neo-classical paradigm. Although many economists came to doubt the universal validity of such models in view of economies of scope, bounded rationality, asymmetric information, and other types of market imperfections and ventured into institutional analysis, the orthodoxy still remains the one which postulate some type of rationality of atomized individuals and the market which mediate among these atomized individuals and firms to reach some stable equilibrium.”

Eisuke Sakakibara (1941) Japanese economist and critic

The End of Market Fundamentalism (1999)

Universe

“Kierkegaard said that the only way we can be released from the enchantment, the siren song of the myths, is to play the music through backwards. To break the spell of the ego I must recover my personal and political history, I must demythologize the private, family, and public myths that have informed me.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 140

Family, Music, Way, History

“Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a “benign bloodbath” in our terminology.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Chomsky and Herman (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, p. 22.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s

People

“We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Toward a General Social Science, 1974, p. 87 quote in: D.A. Bella (1978) Environment, technology, and future generations

Failure

“Because information is often biased, outdated, or inadequate, command-based systems rely on obtuse information to produce blunt solutions. Wielding force like drunken revelers, political systems gamble on the singularity of direction to fix a multiplicity of problems, woefully ignorant that one size does not fit all. Blinded by political ideologies, they rarely act to solve underlying problems. Karl Hess (1923-1994), a former presidential speech writer, noted this condition, observing, ‘Politicians occasionally do the right thing—but only after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 17

Problem

“We can say to the other revolutionaries: you are right to be dissatisfied with this society with its erroneous and unjust ways, but how can you change everything straightaway with your own hands? Do you want to destroy the persons whom you see as adversaries, and even those who you suspect of not being revolutionary?
Do you want the revolution to go forward with massacres, torture, the absolute power of a group, which prevents other people from speaking, informing themselves or criticizing or even living? We want a society founded on love and shall we start with cultivating and stimulating hatred? We want a free society and should we increase tyranny and absolutism? We want a good and clean end and should we use dirty and terrible means?”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Love, People, Way, Change

“The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker.”

Rayner Heppenstall (1911–1981) British writer

Heppenstall, Rayner. Goodman, Jonathan (ed.). The Master Eccentric: The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall, 1969-1981. London: Allison & Busby. 1986. pg. 21. ISBN 0-85031-536-0

Star

“Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Becker (1986) "Do Photographs Tell the Truth?” and “Aesthetics and Truth" as cited in: Ingolf Erler (2010) Das Buch als soziales Symbol. p. 147.

Way, Parting

“The pages of this book, I'm sorry to inform you, contain such unpleasantries as a giant pincer machine, a bad casserole, a man with a cloud of smoke where his head should be, a hypnotist, a terrible accident resulting in injury, and coupons.”

Daniel Handler book The Miserable Mill

The Miserable Mill (2000)

Books

“Geovisualization integrates approaches from visualization in scientific computing (ViSC), cartography, image analysis, information visualization, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and geographic information systems (GISystems) to provide theory, methods, and tools for visual exploration, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of geospatial data”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

any data having geospatial referencing
Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 3

“Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 105

Appearance, Falseness

“Despite the separation of church and state in the U. S. Constitution, a Christian politician facing a conundrum may ask, “What would Jesus do?” or WWJD. A transhumanist politician not only relies on a moral compass but also seeks the best solutions with the help of science and technology in addition to formal and informal politics.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Science, Help

“I am pervaded by the marvel of this art; but I cannot as yet explain it to myself. The Gothic is the world foreshortened. Where am I to begin? For more than thirty years I have been accumulating and comparing my observations. Perhaps eventually I shall succeed in deducing the rule, the law of divine intelligence; but perhaps I shall not have sufficient time. Then it will be the task of another, younger than myself, who will start his researches earlier, and who, besides, will have been informed by me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 183; Rodin talks about cathedrals

World, Law, Art, Intelligence

“Nor, perchance,
If I were not thus taught, Should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 4.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Love, Life, Men, Pleasure

“I now inform you that you are too far from reality.”

Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (1940) Diplomatic politician and he was the Iraqi Information Minister under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, acting as…

Statement to John Burns of The New York Times among his last words to western reporters before going on administrative leave (9 April 2003), as quoted in Politics and Propaganda : Weapons of Mass Seduction (2004) by Nicholas J. O'Shaughnessy, p. 233

Reality