I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible. (Fred Hoyle)

If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything. (Fred Menger)

Numbers do not lie, but they have the propensity to tell the truth with intent to deceive. (Eric Temple Bell)

Another type of backup storage uses a number of large, thin discs (about three feet in diameter), with magnetic coating on the surfaces. (Douglas Engelbart in 1962)

Software: These programs give instruction to the CPU, which processes billions of tiny facts called bytes, and within a fraction of a second it sends you an error message that requires you to call the customer-support hot line and be placed on hold for approximately the life-span of a caribou. (Dave Barry)

There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who can deal in binary and those who can't. (Frank Clarke)

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. (Charles Babbage)

Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed. (Arthur Miller)

All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. (Jacob Bronowski)

Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza. (Michael Rothschild)

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data. (John Naisbitt)

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. ("Sherlock Holmes")

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on quantitative data. (John Sculley)

Data does have a problem, in that it's only available about the past. (Clayton Christensen)

Since humans don’t have decryption systems built into their anatomy, information must be deciphered before we experience it. The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard. The only way to make movies that cannot be copied is to make movies that cannot be viewed. (Gene Kan)

The plural of anecdote is not data. (Frank Kotsonis)

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation, which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used. (Gottfried von Leibnitz)

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. (Mark Twain)

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. (Richard Feynman)

A computer cannot turn bad data into good data. (John R Pierce)

When you cannot measure, when you cannot express in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of a science. (Lord Kelvin)

The mind boggles at the notion of an unsorted master file. (John P Hartmann)

People get a message stating, "There are a lot of interesting things on this disk, but I seem to have misplaced my glasses, so I can't read it right now. Would you like me to utterly destroy all your work for the last year?" Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not actually what it says. It says, "Disk damaged. Initialize?" Anyone writing messages like this needs to be initialized. (Bruce Tognazzini)

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. (Andrew Tannenbaum)

Information is the currency of democracy. (Thomas Jefferson)

It becomes plausible that information belongs among the great concepts of science such as matter, energy and electric charge. (Norbert Wiener in 1954)

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. (Ronald Reagan)

The fog of information can drive out knowledge. (Daniel Boorstin)

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. (Benjamin Disraeli)

Knowledge is not just power, it is income. (Alistair Cockburn)

In the world of systems design, programs and data are the scissor blades working together to form the broader class -- software. Lacking either blade, computers couldn't cut through problems -- yet for many people, software is synonymous with programs. (Tom Gilb)

Most CEO's still believe that it's the chief information officer's job to identify the information he requires. This is, of course, a fallacy. The information officer is a toolmaker; the CEO is the tool user. (Peter Drucker)

There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about. (John von Neumann)

Twenty percent of all input forms filled by people contain bad data. (Vic Vyssotsky)

If your organization was forced to choose between making IT more business savvy or making business more IT savvy, I think you'd get much more bang for the buck by pursuing the latter. (Jeff Tash)

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. (Thomas H Huxley)

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. (Daniel Moynihan)

What you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data. (Thomas Huxley)

On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. (Charles Babbage)

If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape at about 30 miles/second. (Ralph Grishman)

Disk sales double every 9 months. (Greg Papadopoulos)

Now that we have all this useful information, it would be nice to be able to do something with it. (Actually, it can be emotionally fulfilling just to get information. This is usually only true, however, if you have the social life of a kumquat.) (UNIX Programmer's Manual)

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin. (John von Neumann)

The weaker the data available upon which to base one's conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity. (Norman R Augustine)

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. (Mitchell Kapor)

Many companies that have made themselves dependent on IBM-equipment (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems. (Edsger Dijkstra)

We need above all to know about changes; no one wants or needs to be reminded 16 hours a day that his shoes are on. (David Hubel)

In the twenty-first century, whoever controls the screen controls consciousness, information and thought. (Timothy Leary)

World war three will be a guerilla information war, with no distinction between military and civilian participation. (Marshal McLuhan)

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IBM poster explaining virtual memory 1978

• If it's there and you can see it--it's real
• If it's not there and you can see it--it's virtual
• If it's there and you can't see it--it's transparent
• If it's not there and you can't see it--you erased it!