Norbert Wiener Quotes & Sayings

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. — Norbert Wiener

The science of control and communication in the animal and the machine — Norbert Wiener

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

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

To live effectively is to live with adequate information. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

There are no answers, only cross references — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

Information is information, not matter or energy. — Norbert Wiener

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

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 — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

Communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers. — Norbert Wiener

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 — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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

Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy. — Norbert Wiener

Am I really a good mathematician? — Norbert Wiener

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

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. — Norbert Wiener

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

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

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 ... — Norbert Wiener

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

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener

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. — Norbert Wiener