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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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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
Waste
Full
Less
Use
Action
Attributed
Human
Demanded
Humans
Degradation
Status

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

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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.
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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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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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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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 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 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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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 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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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
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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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Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
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
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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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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.
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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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
Norbert Wiener
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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.
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