Herbert A. Simon Quotes

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

People are decisions and actions.

Each of our acts makes a statement as to our purpose.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

I cannot give up my will - I must exercise it, putting it into action.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.

But what a man can do and what a man will do are two different things, he knew.

What people CAN do is very different from what they WILL do.

The greatest power God gave us is the power to choose. We have the opportunity to choose whether we're going to act or procrastinate, believe or doubt, pray or curse, help or heal. We also choose whether we're going to be happy or whether we're going to be sad.

In each case you settle on an act. Doing nothing at all counts as an act.

What happens next is up to you.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

We don't get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.

Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.

So if you don't like your life, change it. How would you change it? You decide. There's no action without first decision. Decision is the mother or the father of action, and action is what changes your life.

The world is in the condition it is in because of you, and the choices you have made - or failed to make. (Not to decide is to decide.) The Earth is in the shape it's in because of you, and the choices you have made - or failed to make. Your own life is the way it is because of you, and the choices you have made - or failed to make.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

People do whatever they want to do, y'know.

A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

We don't just get our choice; we get the consequence that choice creates.

Every human action, whether it has become positive or negative, must depend on motivation.

A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.