Herbert A. Simon Quotes

… a barbarian who could not write one sentence of grammar.

The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet

The most important resource of counties of the future will be the number of math trained brains.

Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.

We have a problem in Africa with our education system. It is a relic from the past. The education system was meant to create clerks to help the administrative role of the colonial power. So the emphasis was on neat handwriting and how to write good reports and things like that, and if you move further, then you study Shakespeare and Molière. But we don’t have enough engineers and scientists. Two percent of African university graduates study agriculture, when 70 percent of our people are living off the land. Obviously, we have a problem.

Comics have always helped people to read. A lot of people learned to read by reading the comics. And it's our livelihood, after all. If people don't know how to read, they're not reading our comics.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we've taken this incredibly interesting subject - how the universe works - and made it boring.

I read good. I was an English major.

I love to write. English is my favorite subject in school.

I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.

The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason - these are very important.

You can convert the teachers, and you can convert the kids, but if they go home saying they want to be a physicist, and the parents question why they would want to do that, then it makes it very difficult.

I believe in science. We're going to bring back science to the state of Wisconsin.

We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh.

I learned reading and writing from my mother.

I want to make everyone believe that they can understand math and science.

Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can't read or write, you don't assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn't learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity.

One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.

A new study shows that American students are becoming less proficient in science, and if the trend continues, we will become a nation that's science and chemistry illiterate. And you thought a lot of meth labs are blowing up now?

Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

A native of America who cannot read or write is . . . as rare as a comet or an earthquake.

If present trends continue, our country may soon find itself far behind many other nations in both science and technology nations where, if you inform strangers that you are a mathematician, they respond with admiration and not by telling you how much they hated math in school, and how they sure could use you to balance their checkbooks.