Norbert Wiener Quotes

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All quotes by Norbert Wiener: Chess Logic Math Mathematics Progress Running Science Slaves more...
  • Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.

  • A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.

    Running   Age   Tongue  
    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.120, Da Capo Press
  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1953). “Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth”
  • Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.46, Da Capo Press
  • 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

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.154, Da Capo Press
  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1950). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”
  • 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

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.96, Da Capo Press
  • Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover, this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to put a single cent into the pockets of their employers.

  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.183, Da Capo Press
  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.33, Da Capo Press
  • Am I really a good mathematician?

  • 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 of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society”, p.32, Hachette UK
  • A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.

    "I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy". Book by Norbert Wiener, p. 322; Cited in: Walter F. Buckley (1967) "Sociology and modern systems theory", p. 82, 1953.
  • A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it.

    "The Human Use of Human Beings". Book by Norbert Wiener, XI. Language, Confusion, and Jam. p. 193, 1950.
  • 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 than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.

    Norbert Wiener (1954). “The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society”
  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.33, Da Capo Press
  • I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.184, Da Capo Press
  • A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.

  • The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.184, Da Capo Press
  • 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.

    Running   Long   Survival  
    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.46, Da Capo Press
  • The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.

    1949 The Human Use of Human Beings.
  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.21, Da Capo Press
  • The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

    Simple  
    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.47, Da Capo Press
  • Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.

    Norbert Wiener (1954). “The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society”
  • There are fields of scientific work...which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology...in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

  • 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 Human Use of Human Beings ch. 7 (1949)
  • We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.46, Da Capo Press
  • The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.163, Da Capo Press
  • 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.

    Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.40, Da Capo Press
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    Norbert Wiener quotes about: Chess Logic Math Mathematics Progress Running Science Slaves