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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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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
Hold
Liquid
Position
Invent
Whatever
Frustrated
Solvent
Two
Solid
Container
Doe
Substance
Containers
Men
Ambition
Dissolve
Life
Universal
Ambitions
Second
Inventor

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