John von Neumann Quotes

If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

The Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it had no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure.

I've always had a really developed sense of justice. As a child, I would rotate my dolls' dresses for fear that they might come alive at midnight and one of them would always have the best dress on. Whatever it was that made me worry about my dolls I suppose has paid off in my career because, really, an actor is all about empathy and imagination. And those are the cornerstones of activism.

I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

The machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.

If you wish particularly to gain the good graces and affection of certain people, men or women, try to discover their most striking merit, if they have one, and their dominant weakness, for every one has his own, then do justice to the one, and a little more than justice to the other.

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

In every moment we make a decision -- whether conscious or unconscious. Will I choose to open my heart, send love, withhold judgment and thus free myself from fear? Or will I close my heart, project fear instead of extending love, judge others, and thus bind myself to fear? The choice is mine and mine alone.

Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

With knowledge, our creation can go in any direction - from the worst kind of drama, to the most beautiful dream. Then the best way to express our creativity is with love and awareness of what we really are.

I believe in continuing to put love and kindness and compassion and art into the world.

Attention without feeling is only a report.

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

This is my experience of Oprah Winfrey - she makes decisions as frequently as she can to contribute with consciousness, with awareness, with love. I know - this is the source of her joy, her vitality, her unending creativity and her connection to people.

You can't organize people if you don't love them. And however hard it can be to love the racist you come in contact with; doing so is the first obligation of a white antiracist.

Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.

people are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.