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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

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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
Quality
Purpose
Important
Purposes
Determination
Determine
Accomplish

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

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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
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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'
Norbert Wiener
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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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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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.
Norbert Wiener
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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
Norbert Wiener
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There are no answers, only cross references.
Norbert Wiener
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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
Norbert Wiener
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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
Norbert Wiener
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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
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Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
Norbert Wiener
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The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a student of gravitational relativity on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, he is praying... that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.
Norbert Wiener
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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
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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.
Norbert Wiener
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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
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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
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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.
Norbert Wiener
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The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.
Norbert Wiener
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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.
Norbert Wiener
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We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Norbert Wiener