Norbert Wiener Quotes

34 quotes in 549 categories

• The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.
• 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…
• 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…
• I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
• It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain…
• 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,…
• The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false…
• To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
• The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.
• There are no answers, only cross references
• Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
• Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase…
• I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
• Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is…
• In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not…
• Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone,…

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