Herbert Simon Quotes

24 quotes in 384 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• One finds limits by pushing them.
• What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a…
• Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how…
• Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.
• Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
• There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad…
• Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn't have it.…
• The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
• The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain…
• Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.
• All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact.
• 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.
• Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of…
• No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.
• In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.
• Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly.
• 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…
• One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it.

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