Norbert Wiener Quotations

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

To live effectively is to live with adequate information.

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.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.

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.

The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is praying. . . that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.

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.

It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other.

There are fields of scientific work...which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology...in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

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.

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.

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.

The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

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

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.

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.

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.

The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.

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.

The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.

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.

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.

the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine

I may remark parenthetically that the modern apparatus of the theory of small samples, once it goes beyond the determination of its own specially defined parameters and becomes a method for positive statistical inference in new cases, does not inspire me with any confidence unless it is applied by a statistician by whom the main elements of the dynamics of the situation are either explicitly known or implicitly felt.

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.

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.

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.

The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.

A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.

Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.

If the human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being.

Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.

Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover, this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to put a single cent into the pockets of their employers.

A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent

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.

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.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

Am I really a good mathematician?

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.

There are no answers, only cross references

Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.

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.

I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'

What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.

Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves

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...

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.

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.