Bill McKibben Quotes

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

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

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

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.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

This is an awesome time to be a knowledge seeker, no better time, but it's also the best time in history to be a complete idiot.

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.

What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.

Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time, never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

Unless you know a lot more about something than I do, I am not really that interested. I have too much information already.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.

Nobody knows enough, but many know too much.

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

The Age of Information, Has turned out to be the Age of Ignorance.

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

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

I'm not really the one in my family who knows everything that's going on, because I don't really pay attention.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I'm slow to pick things up. Everybody always seems to know more than I do.

I wasn't weaned on the web nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.

No matter how much I read the news, I feel slightly ignorant all the time.

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

I feel like the world is getting dumber. I don't necessarily think people are stupid, but I think we're getting dumber.

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.