Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from all over the world. And the Internet is really developed in China. We get news from all over the world.

There were no bubbles before there were media.

Progress in a globally interdependent society relies more than ever on the unimpeded flow of information.

Free and open interchange of information across national borders as a prerequisite for U.S. disarmament talks with the Soviet Union.

Information is moving - you know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it's also moving through the blogosphere and through the Internets.

The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.

There is a way between voice and presence, where information flows. In disciplined silence it opens; with wandering talk it closes.

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

If there is an event for whatever reason, which interferes with the Internet or network communications, are people able to deal with it? It seems like our dependency on these systems is so great that the room for maneuver as it were is very small. So that is problematic.

Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.

In our world, we have so many ways we can escape with technology, like TV, Facebook, computers, text messaging and all that.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

People who can spread ideas regardless of what those ideas are, win.

I put a lot of weight in what I do, and you and I can talk to each other in a certain way because that's how people interact, but I don't really know how to talk to the entire world.

Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.

True communication depends upon our being straightforward with one another... But the best way to communicate may be just to sit without saying anything.

[The Internet] ... is an amazing communications tool that's bringing the whole world together. I mean, you sit down to sign on to America Online in your hometown, and it's just staggering to think that at the same moment, halfway around the world, in China, someone you've never met is sitting at their computer, hearing the exact same busy signal that you're hearing.

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Calling can refer not only to ways of doing - meaning work - but also to ways of being.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, Web pages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications.