Information is empowering

• Information: Facts provided or learned about something or someone. 
• Knowledge: Information and skills acquired through experience or education. The theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
• Information is only a means to empowerment. Knowledge is power and sharing knowledge is empowering. 
• Information is free. Knowledge is not.
• Information is empowering. It can make us stronger, more confident, more in control and more able to claim our rights. It enables us to grow and learn. It helps us to make good decisions, engage with each other, build knowledge, create informed communities, connect globally, and in many other ways. 
• Information provides individuals with knowledge to address public issues, scrutinize government and become active participants in the democratic process. It reveals and clarifies the basis for government decisions, discloses environmental and health dangers and sheds light on error, mismanagement and illegal activities.
• Facts and figures doesn't speak for themselves. They have to be examined and interpreted by reason. Information results in improved records management, prompts routine disclosure of information, and results in better government services and efficiencies.
• Unless information is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.
• Information is power, but interpretation is more powerful. Data taken out of context can have unintended consequences. Transparency alone is not the great equalizer. When we're overloaded with information, wisdom is obscured.  

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; 
this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, 
receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers 
... United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, 

and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context ... Alfred Marshall

Prosperity Is more than having money

The record levels of financial aid, over the last 30 years, to reduce poverty in the poorest nations of Africa has failed. The message is simple: Money as the lone transformative power for lasting national prosperity is not enough. A country needs more than just wealth to be prosperous. It needs to endow its citizens with basic human freedoms, that come from a safe water supply, a roof over their heads and the ability to hold politicians to account for these and other essentials of life. It needs to educate its children and take care of its elderly. It needs to develop a society in which people trust one another. It needs to foster a climate of entrepreneurship and innovation. None of these are achievable without the rule of law and strong, democratic governments. 

• If you ask the average person what she believes is the definition of prosperity, the typical response would be monetary wealth. True prosperity encompasses abundance of wealth, happiness, health, career, relationships, home & family and wisdom. Money has little utility after certain level.
• Wealth alone does not make for a happy and successful society. 
• Happy citizens are produced as much by democracy, freedom, and entrepreneurial opportunity as they are by a growing economy.
• Looking at one's bank balance, we may discover whether the man is rich or poor but we learn nothing about his character, his enjoyment of life, the state of his health, the quality of his education or his attitude toward the people around him.
• GDP is a measure from an age dominated by heavy industry, designed to calculate a nation’s economic production. It has evolved to become the key device used to weigh a country’s economic success, tweak taxes and tackle inflation. The measure works less well with the growing importance of services.
• Finland’s GDP per capita have decreased sharply, but its real wealth, in terms of its citizens living in a free, safe and successful nation, has improved.
• The findings of the 2010 Prosperity Index are: smaller northern European countries rank highest while the bottom two places are occupied by Zimbabwe and Pakistan. The U.K. ranks 13th (same as last year) while the U.S. ranks 10th. 
• Progress and prosperity is as much about well being and contentment as economic success. 
• The critical factors fueling prosperity are open markets, high personal freedom and strong civil society. But given the fragility of such ideas, fury against globalization and rising mood of ugly intolerance, it is always good to restate these important points.
• Nations at the bottom are improving faster than those at the top - but there are important exceptions.
• Plenty of countries, from China to Chile, have shown convergence towards the United States, the world’s biggest economy.
• Britons come third for generating prosperity, despite sluggish growth due to structural reforms but the ratings down to tenth due to their failure to share wealth. This is seen helping open divisions in societies to alarming degree. 
• Oil is exposed as a curse for developing countries, corroding democracy while fueling corruption and rent-seeking activities.
• New Zealand is picked as the planet’s most prosperous place, edging out Norway and Finland. This isolated nation is reliant on agriculture for its economy and its exports – a sector that thrived after government started to ditch subsidies in 1984. Farmers screamed this would be driving them in droves from the land. Instead they were forced to cut costs, innovate and respond to demands from consumers rather than bureaucrats. Now, they are some of the world’s most efficient and inventive producers.

Before national leaders can create effective policy to increase economic growth and social well-being in their country, they must first answer two fundamental questions: What is prosperity, and how is it achieved? 

Gross Domestic Product is an incomplete way of measuring 

a country’s progress, GDP captured  everything except that 

which makes life worthwhile ... Robert F. Kennedy.

Reflections

Reflection is defined as an opinion formed or a remark made after careful thought.

People consciously reflect in order to understand events in their lives and as a consequence hopefully add and enhance meaning. Reflection is associated with 'looking back' and examining the past in order to learn from what happened and not repeat mistakes.

• Style is a reflection of your attitude and your personality. 
• Fashion is a language, for sure, and it is a reflection of society.
• Music and fashion are a sign of the times and a reflection of what people want and need at this very day and age.
• Football is a sport of paradox. It requires reaction, not reflection. Yet you must use your mind to calculate, to anticipate - to think and not think at the same time.
• Cinema is a reflection of its own society.
• The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
• How we treat the poor is a reflection of who we are as a people.
• Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.
• Work needs to be a reflection of your social values. You are how you work!
• Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.
• The coming of honor or disgrace must be a reflection of one's inner power.
• There is a terrible price to be paid when your exterior life is not an honest reflection of your interior life.
• Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
• It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
• With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
• To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
• Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
• The conditions of suffering that exist today in our impoverished communities are not acceptable. The reflection of those conditions are less concerning to me. And I work everyday about changing the conditions.
• There's nothing like meeting someone's family to get a true sense of them and a reflection of their ethics and personality. It just makes them a more rounded person.
• Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.
• A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
• It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
• We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.
• Social media is something of a double-edged sword. At its best, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for marginalized people to speak and bring much needed attention to the issues they face. At its worst, social media also offers 'everyone' an unprecedented opportunity to share in collective outrage without reflection.
• The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
• Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.
• Forgiveness is a very personal and intimate thing. Forgiveness is not something that you can speak for others because it includes not only your desire and will, your reflection and intellect, but also your emotions.
• Most executives I know are so action-oriented, or action-addicted, that time for reflection is the first casualty of their success.
• Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We're reflections. It's a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it. 
• Democracy is just a reflection of our morals and the things that we believe. 
• We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection. 
• The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest. 
• Chaos is the first condition. Order is the first law. Continuity is the first reflection. Quietude is the first happiness.
• Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection. 
• Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness.
• In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.

By actively considering the thoughts and actions one becomes aware of the power of reflective thinking as a tool for continuous improvement, and one that has implications beyond the personal. This in turn enables them to improve ongoing practice, by using the information and knowledge they are gaining from experience. Reflecting critically, and sharing the outcomes of this, can be frightening; working in groups can offer the support and multiple input needed to help deal with this and provide evidence that the process is worthwhile, even if it feels daunting at first.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: 

First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; 

and third by experience, which is the bitterest. -- Confucius

All heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is 
necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand 
themselves the ruling men will be lost.

My View:
When you do routine things you get bored. Then go to a serene place and enjoy in a state of solitariness for self-analysis, introspection, reflection and replenish energies. Therefore, solitude is fortitude.