Heinz von Foerster quotes:

Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today.

Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.

Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity.

Cybernetics is NOT the banana.

Act always so as to increase the number of choices

Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him

Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.

First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.

If you desire to see, learn how to act.

Something that cannot be explained cannot be seen.

The environment as we perceive it is our invention,

What we need now is the description of the "describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.