Herbert Simon famous quotes

06-24-2025

One finds limits by pushing them.
-- Herbert Simon

#Inspiring #Business #Life Changing
Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
-- Herbert Simon

#Mind #Enlightenment #Accidents Happen
The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
-- Herbert Simon

#Death #Design #Study
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.
-- Herbert Simon

#Order #Goal #Designer
Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.
-- Herbert Simon

#Environment #Capacity #Permanent Change
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.
-- Herbert Simon

#Engineering #Medicine #Design
The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
-- Herbert Simon

#Selfish #Intelligent #Individual
All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority.
-- Herbert Simon

#Exercise #Actors #Action
The aim ... is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model . . . . The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the 'real' world the model purports to describe.
-- Herbert Simon

#Real #Two #Groups
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.
-- Herbert Simon

#Spiritual #Science #Interesting
Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.
-- Herbert Simon

#Writing #Learning #Training
Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.
-- Herbert Simon

#Teacher #Learning #Thinking
Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.
-- Herbert Simon

#Important #Forget #Nobel
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.
-- Herbert Simon

#Rain #Clouds #People
There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes.
-- Herbert Simon

#Technology #Thinking #People
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
-- Herbert Simon

#Death #Design #Action

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