Top 50 Norbert Wiener Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.”

— Norbert Wiener

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

— Norbert Wiener

3. “The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.”

— Norbert Wiener

4. “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

5. “The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.”

— Norbert Wiener

6. “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

7. “To live effectively is to live with adequate information.”

— Norbert Wiener

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Norbert Wiener

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

— Norbert Wiener

12. “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

13. “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.”

— Norbert Wiener

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Am I really a good mathematician?”

— Norbert Wiener

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Norbert Wiener

24. “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

25. “At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people.”

— Norbert Wiener

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Norbert Wiener

29. “A professor is one who can speak on any subject – for precisely fifty minutes.”

— Norbert Wiener

30. “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

31. “Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.”

— Norbert Wiener

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Norbert Wiener

41. “For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.”

— Norbert Wiener

42. “There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-“scientific’ narrative method of the professional historian.”

— Norbert Wiener

43. “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

44. “It is the part of the scientist – of the intelligent and honest man of letters and of the intelligent and honest clergyman as well – to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them.”

— Norbert Wiener

45. “As to the inventions of printing and of paper, we generally consider these in the wrong oredr, attributing too much importnace to printing and too little to paper.”

— Norbert Wiener

46. “A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.”

— Norbert Wiener

47. “This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors – that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.”

— Norbert Wiener

48. “To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.”

— Norbert Wiener

49. “I repeat, feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of the control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.”

— Norbert Wiener

50. “Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machines or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.”

— Norbert Wiener