74 Quotes by 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...

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

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.

There are no answers, only cross references.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.