55 Inspiring Quotes About Information

In a world driven by data and knowledge, the importance of information in shaping our lives cannot be overstated. Words have the power to influence thoughts, inspire change, and ignite innovation. Our collection of 55 inspiring quotes about information aims to celebrate the profound impact that knowledge can have on individual growth and societal progress. Whether you’re a lifelong learner, a curious thinker, or someone looking to spark their imagination, these quotes can offer a fresh perspective and a renewed appreciation for the exchange of ideas. Join us as we explore the wisdom and insights that have captured the essence of information in the words of philosophers, scientists, and thought leaders throughout history.

1. “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.” - Margaret Mead

2. “Information is not knowledge.” - Albert Einstein

3. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” - Guy Billout

4. “I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.” - Bill Watterson

5. “In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information: extract for knowledge.Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects against the media.” - Marc Stiegler

6. “In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.” - Daniel Dennett

7. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” - T.S. Eliot

8. “Science is a tool of Common Sense. When we insist that all valid information come from science or doctors, Common Sense becomes uncommon or lost forever.” - Richard Diaz

9. “Information wants to be free.” - Stewart Brand

10. “If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.” - Ray Bradbury

11. “Jeder ist immer erreichbar. Die ganze Welt beschleunigt sich, alles ist dringend, und wo alles dringend ist, ist nichts mehr dringend, und damit schlittern wir in eine Bedeutungslosigkeit hinein.” - Joseph Weizenbaum

12. “Be careful who you choose as your hero or who you choose to deify, be it Clay Aiken or Barack Obama. You put all you're hope and all your dreams and all your ideas about stuff into one human being. They're a human being they're going to let you down. You can't make someone your hero because of something you read on the internet. The internet is not a source of information it is a source of disinformation.” - Craig Ferguson

13. “Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.” - Bruce Coville

14. “And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.” - Timothy Leary

15. “To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads."[American Libraries Magazine, May 28, 2009]” - Jon Bing

16. “I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.” - David Brooks

17. “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” - Bill Gates

18. “The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium.” - Stephen C. Meyer

19. “Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires” - Tobsha Learner

20. “I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.” - Christopher Hitchens

21. “He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.” - Joe Hill

22. “I grew up in libraries, and I hope I've learned never to take them for granted. A thriving library is the heart of its community, providing access to information and educational opportunities, bringing people together, leveling the playing field, and archiving our history.” - Josie Brown

23. “The information. Every bit that of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind Jenna. That we've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way.” - Mary E. Pearson

24. “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.” - Oscar Wilde

25. “There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.” - Antonya Nelson

26. “She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position.Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information.” - Alexander McCall Smith

27. “A pet rock is a serious commitment and too much responsibility for a ten year old to handle on his own” - Kyle Adams

28. “I think Jay is in import and export business as his cards say, but he finally found that the second most valuable commodity today is information.""And?""The most valuable?""People with information," I suggested.” - Len Deighton

29. “{Iola Speaking} "The only time I seem to get you to actually say something is over coffee, so let’s latte.” - Craig Robertson

30. “Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.” - Marilyn Johnson

31. “We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.” - James Gleick

32. “Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.” - James Gleick

33. “When you close to me, my heart has created a vibration of the precise "Carrier frequency" to send all deep information about me to you” - Aditia Rinaldi

34. “To bankrupt a fool, give him information.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

35. “Books deliver information so that experience has a chance to exercise creativity.” - Richard Diaz

36. “Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance in Bali ( an island, don't forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it-you would pray, too).” - Elizabeth Gilbert

37. “Keep in mind that when we limit our exposure to information, or when information itself is scarce, our picture of reality suffers. We become oblivious to both opportunities and hazards. Trends become invisible. History disappears. It's really just two sides of the same coin: the first commitment is as much a commitment to gathering information, from as many sources and in as much volume as can constructively be used, as it is a commitment to facing the facts.” - John Salka

38. “In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.” - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

39. “Stop allowing your outdated ideas to hinder your progress. How would your life be different if you became open to new information that can refine, improve, enhance your way of thinking, and empower your way of living?” - Steve Maraboli

40. “Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.” - James Gleick

41. “Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.” - Jaron Lanier

42. “A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.” - Jaron Lanier

43. “Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .” - Roland Barthes

44. “...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.” - Alan Bennett

45. “When you have the means and information to cure a disease and don't . . . you are the disease.” - Richard Diaz

46. “But what all these responses have in common is that they point to the decisive power of information and stories [...]” - Wes Moore

47. “Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.” - James Gleick

48. “I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.” - David Brooks

49. “Warning:This data storage unit, or "book," has been designed to reprogram the human brain, allowing it to replicate the lost art that was once called reading. It is a simple adjustment and there will be no negative or harmful effects from this process.What you are doing: "Reading" ExplainedEach sheet is indelibly printed with information and the sheets are visually scanned from left to right, and from top to bottom.This scanned information is passed through the visual cortex directly into the brain, where it can then be accessed just like any other data.” - Mike A. Lancaster

50. “To succeed in this day and age, all you need to be ahead of the pack is to be informed, and turn the information into transformation for your betterment and that of others.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

51. “Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army.So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it?The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers.With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later.Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction.The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th” - Timothy Wu

52. “Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.” - Idries Shah

53. “My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.” - Jane Austen

54. “...If I were to feed strangers my information, they wouldn't have enough time to expose themselves to the world.” - Sarah Mercado

55. “A piece of information can change a person. I'd hate to change the way I'm supposed to live the future.” - Samantha Young