Norbert Wiener Quotes

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.

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.

There are no answers, only cross references.

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.

To live effectively is to live with adequate information.

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 possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

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.

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.

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.

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, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.

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 lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.

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.

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 necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.

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.

What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.

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.

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.

I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith.

Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.

The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.