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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

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Norbert Wiener
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 26
Died: 1964
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Psychologist
University Teacher
Columbia
Missouri
Norbert Vineris
Norbert Viner
Nervous
Decisions
Automatic
Machines
Fundamentally
System
Alike
Decision
Devices
Past
Machine
Made
Basis
Make
Bases

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Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
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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.
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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
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The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
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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.
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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.
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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
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Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
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I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
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There are no answers, only cross references.
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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
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A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
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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.
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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.
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Am I really a good mathematician?
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Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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