Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family

One should hardly have to tell academicians that information is a valuable resource: knowledge is power. And yet this occupies a slum dwelling in the town of economics. Mostly it is ignored.

It is accepted fact that the world has been moving from an economy of goods to an economy of knowledge. And knowledge is the single most important resource to any advanced society.

That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it—the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it. In other words, no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing.

Information was control.

What I call the ‘information war’, where through the control of information our society is being radically transformed.

For knowledge itself is power.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production...

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new product.

According to this point of view, knowledge is, so to speak, a by-product of production or of investment. In research, on the contrary, it can be said that knowledge is the primary product. The distinction between products and by-products is not important for ordinary goods, because in a competitive regime the marginal costs of the two must be equal. But since knowledge does not have the normal properties of an economic good, it is necessary to study each mode of its production.

The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, "Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call." That's why democracy happened. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns — that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is.

Information is not like money or any other commodity. The cracks that it can slip through are almost infinitely small, and it can be duplicated at almost zero cost. Soon information will be like air, like the weather, and as easy to control.

Knowledge is power. And with money comes great power that requires the right knowledge to keep it and make it multiply. Without that knowledge, the world pushes you around.