Essential Information Quotes

I was asking Charlie the most important questions, and you heard the answers.

Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.

I always listen to what I can leave out.

Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

Always listen for what you can leave out.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.

One can only continue to expect to be read if one omits everything that is unimportant.

The success of everything depends on intuition, the capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of grasping the essential fact, discarding the unessential, even though one can give no account of the principles by which this is done.

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.

I accept you need the right balance, people do need to know their privacy is protected, but when it's essential information which will be dealt with by security agencies... I do feel the public interest overrides that.

A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

Public authorities should not simply wait until they are asked for information. They should develop policies that take essential information to the people before they ask for it. Such positive actions can be much more cost-effective, and of greater practical utility, than is the case when departments wait passively for the submission of inquiries.

What we need to know in any case is very simple.

You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop-H2O. The reader will get it.

Be brief on the logic and reason portion of your presentation. There are probably about a thousand facts about an automobile, but you don't need them all to make a decision. About a half dozen will do.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

There's so much to learn and so much of it not worth learning.

The book tells you everything you need to know. The book is the map of the world that you're in with the character.

Political journalists love graduate student intelligence, the ability to make clever allusions in seminars, and in 1999-2000, they hassled George W Bush for not having it. They didn't realise what this book succinctly displays: that the president has something far more important - CEO intelligence, the ability to ask tough questions, garner essential information and make discerning decisions.

The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.