Herbert Simon Quotes

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

One finds limits by pushing them.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.

Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful.

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil.

Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly.

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.

One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.

Technology may create a condition, but the questions are what do we do about ourselves. We better understand ourselves pretty clearly and we better find ways to like ourselves

Technology may create a condition, but the questions are what do we do about ourselves. We better understand ourselves pretty clearly and we better find ways to like ourselves.

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating… even awe-inspiring, but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.