Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Purpose
Important
Purposes
Determination
Determine
Accomplish
Quality

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

Image
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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.
Norbert Wiener
Image
To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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.
Norbert Wiener
Image
We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Am I really a good mathematician?
Norbert Wiener
Image
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
Image
The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
Norbert Wiener
Image
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
Norbert Wiener
Image
The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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