Incomplete Information Quotes

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

It is better to be ignorant than to half know something.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.

When you do a cartoon based on news headlines, you do it based on incomplete information.

After all, once you know that part of something exists, it stands to reason that the rest of it is somewhere out there, too.

Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

All I have told is true, but it is not the whole truth.

Imperfect understanding is often more dangerous than ignorance.

My ability to keep cool in a crisis is based entirely on not knowing all the facts.

...buying a fly rod in the average city store, that is, joining it up and safely waggling it a bit, is much like seeing a woman's arm protruding from a car window: all one can readily be sure of is that the window is open.

Insufficient facts always invite danger.

I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.

I think my image gets distorted in the public's mind. They don't get a clear or full picture of what I'm like, despite the press coverage I mentioned early. Mistruths are printed as fact, in some cases, and frequently only half of a story will be told. The part that doesn't get printed is often the part that would make the printed part less sensational by shedding light on the facts.

It's not the one-half that's never been told; it's the three-quarters.

Most of the time, when the mainstream media reports on something, it never tells the whole story.

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so.

A little knowledge can go a long way.

We don't want anybody to come off half-cocked and make a decision about what we're only in the middle of doing, right? So if there's shots of me out there, then somebody's going to say, "Oh, that's not the right way. That's not this and that." It has to be seen in context.

Usually we are saying only part of the truth.