Herbert A. Simon

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.”

“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 need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

“To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.”

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

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

“When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.”

“My home nurtured in me an early attachment to books and other things of the intellect, to music, and to the out of doors.”

“My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others.”

“I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.”

“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.”

“Among my European ancestors were piano builders, goldsmiths, and vintners but, to the best of my knowledge, no professionals of any kind.”

“Whereas economic man maximises, selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices, looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or 'good enough'.”

“I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving.”

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

“I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods.”

“The proper study of mankind is the science of design.”

“You can love two or more women at once... but you cannot be loyal to more than one.”