the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine

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.

Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.

I may remark parenthetically that the modern apparatus of the theory of small samples, once it goes beyond the determination of its own specially defined parameters and becomes a method for positive statistical inference in new cases, does not inspire me with any confidence unless it is applied by a statistician by whom the main elements of the dynamics of the situation are either explicitly known or implicitly felt.

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.

The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.