Edward Abbey Quotes

Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.

Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

Nobody knows enough, but many know too much.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

We are effectively living in a world of communications and information abundance.

Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers— conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress.

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I think the American people are bombarded with information from all directions, all day long.

Publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.