Herbert Simon Quotes

Quotes about:

• A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

  Herbert Simon

  Attention, Information, Poverty

  "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World". "Communication, and the Public Interest". Book by Martin Greenberger, pp. 40-41, 1971.

  89 Copy quote

• Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

  Herbert Simon

  Mean, Design, Problem

  48 Copy quote

• 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

  49 Copy quote

• One finds limits by pushing them.

  Herbert Simon

  Motivational, Inspiring, Business

  65 Copy quote

• 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

  "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World". "Communication, and the Public Interest". Book by Martin Greenberger, pp. 40-41, 1971.

  29 Copy quote

• A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

  Herbert Simon

  Rivers, Drawing, Decision

  22 Copy quote

• Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

  Herbert Simon

  Mind, Enlightenment, Accidents Happen

  40 Copy quote

• Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

  Herbert Simon

  Sick, Design, Intellectual

  "The Sciences of the Artificial". Book by Herbert A. Simon, p. 130, 1969.

  34 Copy quote

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

  Herbert Simon

  Opportunity, Giving, Rational

  4 Copy quote

• The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

  Herbert Simon

  Death, Design, Study

  "Clive Dilnot’s Speech at Graduation Ceremony of MA Design Studies 2016 class". adht.parsons.edu. June 13, 2016.

  31 Copy quote

• Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.

  Herbert Simon

  Results, Humans, Knows

  30 Copy quote

• Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

  Herbert Simon

  Reflection, Simple, Chaos

  "The Sciences of the Artificial". Book by Herbert A. Simon, p. 53, 1969.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Herbert Simon

  Death, Design, Action

  "The Sciences of the Artificial". Book by Herbert A. Simon, p. 130, 1969.

  23 Copy quote

• 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, Permanent Change, Produce

  31 Copy quote

• Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

  Herbert Simon

  Innovation, Surprise, Unusual

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Medicine, Engineering, Design

  19 Copy quote

• Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.

  Herbert Simon

  Thinking, Design Process, Generations

  21 Copy quote

• By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.

  Herbert Simon

  Men, Machines, Can Do

  18 Copy quote

• The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

  Herbert Simon

  Memories, Intuition, Experts

  17 Copy quote

• No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek

  Herbert Simon

  Hayek, Von Hayek, Mechanism

  17 Copy quote

• Assuming that a tax increase is necessary, it is clearly preferable to impose the additional cost on land by increasing the land tax, rather than to increase the wage tax - the two alternatives open to the City (of Pittsburgh). It is the use and occupancy of property that creates the need for the municipal services that appear as the largest item in the budget - fire and police protection, waste removal, and public works. The average increase in tax bills of city residents will be about twice as great with wage tax increase than with a land tax increase.

  Herbert Simon

  Fire, Average, Land

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Herbert Alexander Simon (1947). “Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization”

  4 Copy quote

• The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive.

  Herbert Simon

  Two, Tests, Tasks

  7 Copy quote

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