Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

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

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

We are drowning in information.

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.

Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life. I just think that technology and information, it's overwhelming at the moment, but it's really going to make life better.

If you can read, you can find books on anything you want. You can self-educate even if you can't afford to go to school.

The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security.

Information is control.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

It may be an information age, but... It takes more work to earn more money to be overwhelmed by more information that does not equal knowledge or wisdom.

Library Science is the key to all science, just as mathematics is its language - and civilization will rise or fall, depending on how well librarians do their jobs.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

Why was it librarians had such a prim image? With all the information available in books right there at their fingertips, librarians could be the best-informed people around. About anything.

Remember that accumulated knowledge, like accumulated capital, increases at compound interest: but it differs from the accumulation of capital in this; that the increase of knowledge produces a more rapid rate of progress, whilst the accumulation of capital leads to a lower rate of interest. Capital thus checks it own accumulation: knowledge thus accelerates its own advance. Each generation, therefore, to deserve comparison with its predecessor, is bound to add much more largely to the common stock than that which it immediately succeeds.

I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

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?

I read constantly because there is so much to learn from the writing in the world.