Norbert Wiener

“Cybernetics is the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine.”

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

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

“The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain.”

“The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the basis of decisions they have made in the past.”

“Information is information, not matter or energy.”

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

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

“The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.”

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

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

“The world of the future will be an ever 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 stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”