Quotes from John von Neumann

You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.

Can we survive technology?

Se la gente non crede che la matematica è semplice, è solo perché non capisce quanto è complicata la vita.

It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident.

Kurt Gödel's achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental – indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time. ... The subject of logic has certainly completely changed its nature and possibilities with Gödel's achievement." —John von Neumann

An element which stimulates itself will hold a stimulus indefinitely.

In any conceivable method ever invented by man, an automaton which produces an object by copying a pattern, will go first from the pattern to a description to the object. It first abstracts what the thing is like, and then carries it out. It's therefore simpler not to extract from a real object its definition, but to start from the definition.

In this sense, an object is of the highest degree of complexity if it can do very difficult and involved things.

And' and 'or' are the basic operations of logic. Together with 'no' (the logical operation of negation) they are a complete set of basic logical operations—all other logical operations, no matter how complex, can be obtained by suitable combinations of these.

The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microsoptic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally percieves the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes.

A system of logical instructions that an automaton can carry out and which causes the automaton to perform some organized task is called a code.