Quotes by 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 me...”

“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 patternsthat perpetuate themselves.”

“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.”

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

“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...”

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

“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.”

“Information is information, not matter or energy.”

“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.”

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

“In the past, the community of scholars has made it a custom to furnish scientific information to any person seriously seeking it. However, we must face these facts: The policy of the government its...”

“The experience of the scientists who have worked on the atomic bomb has indicated that in any investigation of this kind the scientist ends by putting unlimited powers in the hands of the people wh...”

“[T]he best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same cat.”

“The measures taken during the war by our military agencies, in restricting the free intercourse among scientists on related projects or even on the same project have gone so far that it is clear th...”

“I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists...”

“There are no answers, only cross-references.”

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

“It is my thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers... although they are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until ...”

“The terms black box and white box are convenient and figurative expressions of not very well determined usage. I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks...”