Quotes from Norbert Wiener

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

To live effectively is to live with adequate information.

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

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.

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

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 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.

We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

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

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.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

Information is information, not matter or energy.

Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.

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. One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.