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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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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
Ideas
Everything
Contingent
Nothing
Obtained
World
Significant
Organization
Necessary
Idea
Cannot

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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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There are no answers, only cross references.
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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 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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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.
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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.
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Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
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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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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.
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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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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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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
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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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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 simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
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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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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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We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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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