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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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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
Modify
Modified
Radically
Exist
Environment
Must

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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.
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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
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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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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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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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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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 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 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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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.
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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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Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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