Top 50 Marvin Minsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”

— Marvin Minsky

Featured in: Learning Quotes, Study Quotes

2. “Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.”

— Marvin Minsky

3. “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.”

— Marvin Minsky

4. “We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.”

— Marvin Minsky

5. “Logic doesn’t apply to the real world.”

— Marvin Minsky

6. “If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.”

— Marvin Minsky

7. “We’ll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”

— Marvin Minsky

8. “The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.”

— Marvin Minsky

9. “Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!”

— Marvin Minsky

10. “I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy’s comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we’d have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.”

— Marvin Minsky

11. “Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas – of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.”

— Marvin Minsky

12. “I bet the human brain is a kludge.”

— Marvin Minsky

13. “Minds are simply what brains do.”

— Marvin Minsky

14. “An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.”

— Marvin Minsky

15. “The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong to seek the “real meaning” of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.”

— Marvin Minsky

16. “What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.”

— Marvin Minsky

17. “No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.”

— Marvin Minsky

18. “There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.”

— Marvin Minsky

19. “The brain happens to be a meat machine.”

— Marvin Minsky

20. “It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.”

— Marvin Minsky

21. “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look far out of focus.”

— Marvin Minsky

22. “Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.”

— Marvin Minsky

23. “When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.”

— Marvin Minsky

24. “Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.”

— Marvin Minsky

25. “Within 10 years computers won’t even keep us as pets.”

— Marvin Minsky

26. “In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.”

— Marvin Minsky

27. “We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.”

— Marvin Minsky

28. “Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.”

— Marvin Minsky

29. “Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.”

— Marvin Minsky

30. “This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem – and in particular to perform integration – you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.”

— Marvin Minsky

31. “Eventually, robots will make everything.”

— Marvin Minsky

32. “Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.”

— Marvin Minsky

33. “There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.”

— Marvin Minsky

34. “Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.”

— Marvin Minsky

35. “To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there’s something wrong with questions like, “What caused the Universe to exist?””

— Marvin Minsky

36. “But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it’s stuck.”

— Marvin Minsky

37. “What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions...”

— Marvin Minsky

38. “Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children’s thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.”

— Marvin Minsky

39. “Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to ‘discover’ that–where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.”

— Marvin Minsky

40. “In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.”

— Marvin Minsky

41. “Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.”

— Marvin Minsky

42. “Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.”

— Marvin Minsky

43. “Kubrick’s vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke’s is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.”

— Marvin Minsky

44. “But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler’s discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.”

— Marvin Minsky

45. “It would be as useless to perceive how things ‘actually look’ as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.”

— Marvin Minsky

46. “All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints – limitations on space, time, and materials.”

— Marvin Minsky

47. “We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake – like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.”

— Marvin Minsky

48. “One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.”

— Marvin Minsky

49. “General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”

— Marvin Minsky

50. “By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park – without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.”

— Marvin Minsky