Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

Intelligence always carries uncertainties. That is the nature of the beast.

It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.

Facts are often complicated.

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

I think something that's really understudied and misunderstood is the use of information.

There are no answers, only cross references.

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

The world is too full of information.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.

I know because I read. Might I suggest you try it?

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?