Norbert Wiener Quotes



Best 23 The Human Use of Human Beings Quotes by Norbert Wiener

The Human Use of Human Beings Quotes

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“All philosophers and all sociologists draw their scientific ideas from the sources available at their time.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

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

The Human Use of Human Beings

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

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

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

The Human Use of Human Beings

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“Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.”


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“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“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.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

“We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

The Human Use of Human Beings

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

The Human Use of Human Beings

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“Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics”


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