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

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
Math
Prosperity
Mathematics
Imposes
Possibility
Entropy
Progress
Restrictions
Future
Restriction
Possibilities
Mathematical

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Am I really a good mathematician?
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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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The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
Norbert Wiener
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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
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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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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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
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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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We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Norbert Wiener
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A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
Norbert Wiener
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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.
Norbert Wiener
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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.
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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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