Herbert A. Simon Quotes

#1. Time and again, we have found the 'idle' truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs.

Herbert A. Simon

#2. The choices we make lead up to actual experiences. It is one thing to decide to climb a mountain. It is quite another to be on top of it.

Herbert A. Simon

#3. Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe.

Herbert A. Simon

#4. The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population.

Herbert A. Simon

#5. You can love two or more women at once ... but you cannot be loyal to more than one.

Herbert A. Simon

#6. I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

Herbert A. Simon

#7. In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.

Herbert A. Simon

#8. By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.

Herbert A. Simon

#9. I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods.

Herbert A. Simon

#10. Like Humpty Dumpty, we can make words mean anything we want them to mean.

Herbert A. Simon

#11. Whereas economic man maximises, selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices, looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or 'good enough'.

Herbert A. Simon

#12. I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.

Herbert A. Simon

#13. My home nurtured in me an early attachment to books and other things of the intellect, to music, and to the out of doors.

Herbert A. Simon

#14. Among my European ancestors were piano builders, goldsmiths, and vintners but, to the best of my knowledge, no professionals of any kind.

Herbert A. Simon

#15. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention ...

Herbert A. Simon

#16. The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.

Herbert A. Simon

#17. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. My father, an electrical engineer, had come to the United States in 1903 after earning his engineering diploma at the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany.

Herbert A. Simon

#18. 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 A. Simon

#19. When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.

Herbert A. Simon

#20. The Nobel prizes memorialize Alfred Nobel's faith in the contribution that human thought, directed to science and art, can make to human welfare.

Herbert A. Simon

#21. My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others.

Herbert A. Simon

#22. I think those who object to my characterizing man as simple want somehow to retain a deep mystery at his core.

Herbert A. Simon

#23. To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.

Herbert A. Simon

#24. I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving.

Herbert A. Simon