It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.
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"I am not a great mathematician; I am merely a good one."
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations."
"The world is so complicated that it cannot be described in any other way than by itself."
"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
"My own feeling is that the most important advances in the future will come from the interaction of mathematics with other sciences."
Expressing a deterministic and somewhat cynical view of human behavior, comparing it to immutable laws of physics.
Date: Mid-20th century
ShockingFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Complaining that people act selfishly or betray one another is as pointless as complaining that physics works the way it does. Human self-interest and deception are not moral failures to be lamented — they are predictable features of human nature, as reliable and immutable as electromagnetic laws. Rational people should account for these tendencies the way engineers account for physical constraints: not with outrage, but with clear-eyed understanding and design around them.
Von Neumann co-invented game theory, which mathematically models strategic behavior among rational, self-interested actors — exactly the human nature this quote describes. He worked on the Manhattan Project and advised on Cold War nuclear strategy, environments where anticipating treachery was survival. His worldview treated social phenomena as rigorously as physics, and he was widely known for cold, unsentimental realism about human motivation rather than idealistic moralizing.
Von Neumann lived through WWII and the early Cold War, when betrayal and espionage were daily realities — Soviet spies, shifting alliances, nuclear brinkmanship. Maxwell's equations were already foundational to physics, making the analogy instantly recognizable to contemporaries. Game theory emerged in this same period precisely to model adversarial behavior mathematically rather than morally. The quote captures a moment when naive trust between nations had collapsed and strategic calculation replaced idealism.
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