HERBERT A. SIMON

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.

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.

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

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'.

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

Like Humpty Dumpty, we can make words mean anything we want them to mean.

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.

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.

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 tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

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

The Nobel prizes memorialize Alfred Nobel's faith in the contribution that human thought, directed to science and art, can make to human welfare.

The choices we make lead up to actual experiences. It is one thing to decide to climb a mountain. It is quite another to be on top of it.

Time and again, we have found the 'idle' truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

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

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

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.

Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature.

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.

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.

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