Norbert Wiener Quotes

There's nothing worse than having everybody thinking alike, talking alike and having the same direction in mind. It gets stale that way.

I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

You can't put me in a box, because then it's just like, you're not gonna get anything.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

I think the human spirit is a real powerful spirit. It has no limits and it has no ends. And I hate to see it put in any kind of box - pink or green.

Today I finally overcame tryin’ to fit the world inside a picture frame.

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps.

If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.

Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.

We are human beings, not ants.

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.

One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.

If it requires a uniform, it's a worthless endeavor.

A mind that is disciplined, controlled, is free within its own pattern; but that is not freedom. The end of discipline is conformity; its path leads to the known, and the known is never the free.

All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by.

The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.

Growing up is a trap," snapped Dr. Robbins. "When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.

Are you crazy? I don't want to wear ideas. I don't want to have all these complicated thing.

Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity.

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.