Weinberger Quotes & Sayings

I've learned the dangerous lesson of the web: You succeed by giving up control, and that's inverse of the normal campaign. — David Weinberger

Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved. — David Weinberger

Your organization is becoming hyperlinked. Whether you like it or not. It's bottom-up; it's impossible. — David Weinberger

The degree to which campaigns have become dominated by marketing is breaking the spirit of democracy, and we're all just so sick of it, across party lines. — David Weinberger

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it. — David Weinberger

Rabbi Moshe Weinberger of Mesivta Beis Shraga related how his father used to say that on Purim, the handle of the gragger (noisemaker) we spin is beneath the gragger itself, while on Chanukah the handle of the dreidel (four-sided top) we spin is on top. Purim, he expounded, represents human initiative, an "awakening from below," while Chanukah represents Divine intervention, an "awakening from above." On Purim, we stir ourselves with drink, joy, a hearty meal and other activities. On Chanukah, we light a candle that we are not allowed to use for any purpose other than to gaze at its flame. We just sit back and look. We let Hashem take over. We remind ourselves that Hashem is running the show. — Yaakov Astor

I have had a long unabashed love affair with dogs that stretches back to early childhood. — Caspar Weinberger

Reagan was president. He had the authority to end the infighting, set policy, and advance American interests in the Middle East. Before him was a clear choice; Shultz arguing for engagement, Weinberger for disengagement. Engagement would likely have involved the use of military force; disengagement offered the comfort of a casualty-free retreat. In the post-Vietnam era, for this president, at this time, disengagement made more sense. He still talked a good game, but when it was time for a decision, he punted. "In the weeks immediately after the bombing," he later wrote, "I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave."58 And yet, fearful of another Vietnam, he waited a few months and then pulled the remaining marines out of Beirut. According to McFarlane many years later, his decision opened the door to the terrorism that has plagued the region and the world ever since. "I am convinced we could have stopped it then, just as it was starting, but Reagan chose not to. — Marvin Kalb

Don't think of the Internet as a broadcast medium ... think of it as a conversational space. Conversation is the opposite of marketing. It's talking in our own voices about things we want to hear about. — David Weinberger

Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network. — David Weinberger

The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape — David Weinberger

Citizens are starting not to excuse political candidates who have web sites that do nothing but throw virtual confetti. — David Weinberger

To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata. — David Weinberger

The cure to information overload is more information. — David Weinberger

We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom. — Caspar Weinberger

In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve ... or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time. — David Weinberger

Every embarrassing moment is going to be shown on the Internet, whether the candidate likes it or not. The ones that can't deal with that are going to fail. — David Weinberger

We've known for a long time, and I think culturally we've accepted, that diversity is an important thing in the work of knowledge. — David Weinberger

Kelso and Adler's book could start a revolution. — Caspar Weinberger

How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams. — David Weinberger

William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: "You know those poems you're writing? They're no good." — Eliot Weinberger

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent. — David Weinberger

Sanctions and negotiations can be very ineffective, and indeed foolish, unless the people you are talking with and negotiating with and trying to reach agreements with are people who can be trusted to keep their word. — Caspar Weinberger

The smartest person in the room, is the room. — David Weinberger

I think women are too valuable to be in combat. — Caspar Weinberger

This is an awesome time to be a knowledge seeker, no better time, but it's also the best time in history to be a complete idiot. — David Weinberger

Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong - and thus to advance our knowledge. What's happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is. — David Weinberger

How your social network - the people that you know, or in your community - understand or value a work can be ... a tremendously relevant indicator of how important or meaningful it's going to be to you. — David Weinberger

If explicit metadata is a real problem, it raises problems that just can't be solved. It's not that we're not good at it; it's the problems cannot be solved because we're not going to agree about these deep questions of how we organize. — David Weinberger

That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory? — Shmuel Weinberger

Translation is not appropriation, as is sometimes claimed; it is a form of listening that then changes how you speak. — Eliot Weinberger

Personalization is the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them, so that we can feel that somewhere there's a piece of software that loves us for who we are. — David Weinberger

In the digital age, we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts. — David Weinberger

We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles. — David Weinberger

Even an inaccurate missile is quite a deterrent. — Caspar Weinberger

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence. — David Weinberger

It took the Gulf War to demonstrate that America did want more than one friend in the Mideast, and also was willing to take and make major risks to prevent a small Muslim country, Kuwait, from being overrun and in effect stolen by Iraq. — Caspar Weinberger

My mother's death
changed the alchemy of food.
Holidays run together now
like ungrooved rivers. I forget
what they are for. I buy bakery goods.
They look dead
under the blue lights.
I don't do anything the way she taught me
but I get fat.
I don't look like her and I don't sound
like her, but I stand like her. — Florence Weinberger

We sort of understood abstractly the idea that there are only two kinds of software projects: failures and future legacy horrors. — Peter Weinberger

Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations. — David Weinberger

Transparency is the new objectivity — David Weinberger

O love is to battle, if two kiss
the world changes, desires take flesh
thoughts take flesh, wings sprout
on the backs of the slave, the world is real
and tangible, wine is wine, bread
regains its savor, water is water,
to love is to battle, to open doors,
to cease to be a ghost with a number
forever in chains, forever condemned
by a faceless master;
the world changes
if two look at each other and see
Piedra de Sol (The Sun Stone), translated by Eliot Weinberger — Octavio Paz

Here rests the soul of our nation - here also should be our conscience. — Caspar Weinberger

The Internet's abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing - including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge. — David Weinberger

History keeps teaching us that we can't recognize the important events that are going to trigger changes. — David Weinberger

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, assessing a Polish crisis in 1984, said: "There's continuing ground for serious concern and the situation remains serious. The longer it remains serious, the more ground there is for serious concern. — William Zinsser

I think you will find scientists that think like you in Germany and Britain, and you will find politicians that think like Weinberger. I think the most bellicose ruling group in the Western world at the moment is the British. — E.P. Thompson

With the new medium of knowledge - the Internet - knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. — David Weinberger