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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

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

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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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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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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.
Norbert Wiener
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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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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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We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
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There are no answers, only cross references.
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Am I really a good mathematician?
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Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
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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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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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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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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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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
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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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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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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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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I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
Norbert Wiener