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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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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
Truth
Ideas
Vagueness
Matter
Fringe
Must
Useful
Degree
Logic
Degrees
Concern

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Am I really a good mathematician?
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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 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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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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A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
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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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Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
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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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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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There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.
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 professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
Norbert Wiener
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Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
Norbert Wiener
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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
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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