Source: Tomorrow Is Now (1963), p. xv
Context: We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.
“It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.”
Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter XI, Beyond the Economic Revolution, p. 317
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Robert L. Heilbroner 39
American historian and economist 1919–2005Related quotes
Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary (1970)
By Any Means Necessary (1970)
"Optical transmission" in Information Theory : Papers Read at a Symposium on Information Theory (1952), as cited in Living Systems (1978) by James Grier Miller, p. 12
Context: Incomplete knowledge of the future, and also of the past of the transmitter from which the future might be constructed, is at the very basis of the concept of information. On the other hand, complete ignorance also precludes communication; a common language is required, that is to say an agreement between the transmitter and the receiver regarding the elements used in the communication process...
[The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.' These data comprise both the convention regarding the symbols and the language used, and the knowledge available at the moment when the message started.
Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 1
Speech at Zurich University (September 19, 1946) ( partial text http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/astonish.html) ( http://www.peshawar.ch/varia/winston.htm).
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 275.
Coding theorems for a discrete source with a fidelity criterion. IRE International Convention Records, volume 7, pp. 142--163, 1959.
Context: This duality can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.