Overwhelming Information Quotes

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

We sit for a week and listen to an extraordinary amount of people talk about what they do in the intelligence world. It's pretty overwhelming.

Knowledge is almost annoying.

An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.

You cram these words into mine ears against The stomach of my sense.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

Too much to know is to know naught but fame.

We're all happier when we know less, because the details are frightening and haven't really improved much. The more you pay attention, the more horrifying the world is.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

I feel like I can't fully understand what's happening now until I really understand what's happened before. But you do get sort of bogged down a little bit when you're trying to study so many years' worth of music. It can be a little bit overwhelming.

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.