"Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool."

“Science has taught us that what we see and touch is not what is really there.”

“The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.”

“If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole,you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again.”

“To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.”

“In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content.”

“Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message.”