Jane Smiley Quotes

Information is the oxygen of the modern age.

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.

Today knowledge is free. It's like air, it's like water... There's no competitive advantage to knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn't care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.

Intellectual capital is the most valuable of all factors of production.

A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.

It appears to Nietzsche that the modern age has produced for imitation three types of man ... First, Rousseau's man, the Titan who raises himself ... and in his need calls upon holy nature. Then Goethe's man ... a spectator of the world ... Third Schopenhauer's man ... voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth.

That prudery which survives youth and beauty resembles a scarecrow left in the fields after harvest.

In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Today the greatest single source of wealth is between your ears.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.

This is the age of oddities let loose.

Many said selfishness was the flaw of our modern age; but then self-conceit emerged from a corner of the deepest hell to join selfishness.

We can arrive at better solutions to any problem or pain together, than we can by ourselves. The beauty of the modern age is that you are able to source answers, and sometimes the genius is in the combination of ideas and energy that does not reside in only one person.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

To me, this is not an information age. It's an age of networked intelligence, it's an age of vast promise.

We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.

Simplicity, very rare in our age.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

We are living in a dynamic age with multiple ideas and beliefs of correctness; this world is not deterministic and not still.

To be successful in a knowledge economy firms need to create learning organizations.