Life & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Keys Moran

Moran’s line is a neat little booby trap for anyone who thinks “data” is the cold, boring part and “information” is the meaningful upgrade. He flips that hierarchy: data is not the enemy of insight; it’s the cost of admission. You can hoard numbers, logs, and measurements and still be clueless, because raw facts don’t automatically cohere into a signal. But if you claim to possess information - something that reduces uncertainty, guides action, or changes what you believe - you’re implicitly claiming a trail of evidence underneath it, even if you’re hiding the receipts.

The specific intent reads like a rebuke to hand-wavy punditry and institutional storytelling. In an era of dashboards and “data-driven” branding, Moran draws a hard boundary: information is not vibes. The subtext is almost moral. If information must cash out in data, then credibility is accountable. You can argue about interpretation, sampling, bias, and framing - all the messy human parts - but you can’t skip the substrate. That makes the quote a quiet defense of empiricism without pretending empiricism is pure.

Context matters: Moran is a science-fiction writer, which is exactly where this distinction becomes cultural tech criticism. SF has long been preoccupied with surveillance, computation, and the politics of knowing. His phrasing anticipates today’s fights over “alternative facts,” AI systems that launder correlations into authority, and corporate analytics that confuse volume with clarity. The line works because it’s asymmetrical: it grants how easy it is to produce data without meaning, while insisting that meaning without evidence is just rhetoric wearing a lab coat.