Quote

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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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
Progress
Simple
Faith
Acquiescence
Belonging
Hence
Conviction
Weakness
Strength

More quotes by 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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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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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
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Am I really a good mathematician?
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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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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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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.
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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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There are no answers, only cross references.
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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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
Norbert Wiener
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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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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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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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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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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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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 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