It is the part of the scientist – of the intelligent and honest man of letters and of the intelligent and honest clergyman as well – to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them.

Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.

This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors – that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.

There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-“scientific’ narrative method of the professional historian.

As to the inventions of printing and of paper, we generally consider these in the wrong oredr, attributing too much importnace to printing and too little to paper.

A professor is one who can speak on any subject – for precisely fifty minutes.

I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much ‘know-how’ he may have, has very little ‘know-what’

A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one’s blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.