Herbert A. Simon Quotes

Everything has a cause.

We live in a world of cause and effect.

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.

The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula.

What is meant by cause? Cause is the fine state of the manifested state.

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

A CAUSE is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.

Proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.

The search for causes must come after the collection of facts.

That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that soes not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotient have any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.

Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time

We have come so far. It's become a real bipartisan cause, which I'm very happy to see. And in the case of America, and it's - certainly, without America, we'd be facing catastrophe.

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

I would say the biggest single cause was we had an incredible residential real estate bubble.

True wisdom consists of tracing effects to their causes.

We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination.

The Problem is never the problem! It is only a symptom of something much deeper.

Thought is the seed of action.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.