Anatol Rapoport Quotes

To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.

The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community.

Cooperate on move one; thereafter, do whatever the other player did the previous move.

Do you know that all great spurts in...progress came just after some unorthodox ideas or exotic impressions had penetrated into a closed system?

A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist.

The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow".

The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality.

A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other propositions.

It is misleading in a crucial way to view information as something that can be poured into an empty vessel, like a fluid or even energy.

The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision.

The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.

It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.

[It is a] well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals.