Vannevar Bush Quotes

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

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

FBI documents are a lethal garbage can. Everything that anybody has ever said about someone is put in the file…. You have to read everything and decide what is important.

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.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [Information] that is not only renewable, but self- generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.

Digiphrenia - how technology lets us be in more than one place - and self - at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds - home and battlefield - simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed.

Any information is valuable to the degree that you can use it.

There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.

The literature has become too vast to comprehend...It is...difficult to grasp even for workers in closely neighboring fields. ...There is much more reliance on word of mouth for the transmission of scientific data...gossip.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.

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.

There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world.

There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.

TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

Kids are growing up and they don't know the difference between fact and fiction. The line is getting blurry. I can handle it, you know; I'm a big boy. And the entertainment industry has always been crazy. But the problem is, it spills over into some very serious issues, in politics and real newsworthy stuff.

There's too much of everything - too many bands, too many albums, too much information all the time. You're seeing fewer album releases treated as big events, because of the influx. It's almost a "here this week, forgotten next week" thing.

The cure to information overload is more information.

Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications?

In my travels I have found that those who keep Heaven in view remain serene and cheerful in the darkest day. If the glories of Heaven were more real to us, if we lived less for material things and more for things eternal and spiritual, we would be less easily disturbed by this present life.

That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.

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.

Americans like to believe we can overcome all obstacles and always triumph in the end, but that's not real life and a steady diet of stories like that will give you a pretty unhealthy view of reality.