75 Insightful Information Quotes

In a world overflowing with information, finding clarity and wisdom can be a challenging endeavor. As we navigate the streams of data that constantly bombard us, there’s immense value in pausing to reflect upon the deeper insights that shape our understanding. Quotes often encapsulate profound truths in a way that resonates with our experiences, offering guidance and perspective. In this collection, we have curated 75 of the most insightful information quotes that cut through the noise, presenting timeless wisdom from diverse thinkers and eras. Whether you're seeking motivation, enlightenment, or a moment of reflection, these quotes serve as a beacon, illuminating the path to greater understanding. Join us as we delve into the distilled brilliance of these words and explore the transformative power of insightful information.

1. “The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

2. “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

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

4. “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

5. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

6. “A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.” - George Saunders

7. “But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don't know, via high-tech sources, it's clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others.” - George Saunders

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

9. “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

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

11. “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

12. “There’s no going back, and there’s no hiding the information. So let everyone have it.” - Andrew Kantor

13. “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

14. “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

15. “In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.” - Timothy Leary

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

20. “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

21. “Isn’t that wonderful? That feeling of not knowing too much about something… Incomplete information… Endless possibilities… When you don’t know much about something, it’s the most exciting sensation.-Kutsnetz in TALUS” - Erol Ozan

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

23. “[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.” - Alan Bennett

24. “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

25. “When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.” - Ursula K. LeGuin

26. “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

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

28. “Cram them full of non-combustible 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. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.” - Ray Bradbury

29. “What we find changes who we become.” - Peter Morville

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.” - Brian Christian

33. “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

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

35. “We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us.Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.” - David Eagleman

36. “We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.” - James Gleick

37. “In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.” - Criss Jami

38. “Learning isn't acquiring knowledge so much as it is trimming information that has already been acquired.” - Criss Jami

39. “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

40. “Information can be harmful when you're not ready for it. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']” - Richard Walter

41. “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

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

43. “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

44. “...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.” - Orson Scott Card

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

46. “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

47. “The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.” - Nick Drake

48. “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

49. “We either need an overwhelming force advantage, or we need more information.""Reinforcements cut into our bounty, remember?""It's unanimous. We need more information.” - Howard Tayler

50. “Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else.” - Nick Harkaway

51. “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

52. “You are trying to lure us into revealing information you're not entitled to? With chocolate and wine? Are you amateurs?” - Moira J. Moore

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.” - Julian Assange

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

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

59. “A surfeit of information often hides an untruth,” he said, with annoying clarity.” - Jasper Fforde

60. “It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.” - Alain De Botton

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

62. “Information can be such a double-edged sword.” - Jessiqua Wittman

63. “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

64. “Kada policijos informatorius tampa išties patikimas? Kai atskleidžia sąmokslą. Tad reikia surengti sąmokslą, apie kurį galėtų pranešti.” - Umberto Eco

65. “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

66. “…the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.” - Alan Jacobs

67. “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

68. “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

69. “People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.” - Idries Shah

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

71. “The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.” - Umberto Eco

72. “Deciding what to read is also a matter of filtering.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

73. “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

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

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