Norbert Wiener Quotes
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.
Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.
The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.
A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.
The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
If the human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being.
Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.
Any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste.
It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other.
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy
Information is information, not matter or energy.
The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.