Quotes from Herbert A. Simon

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.

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

a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. 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.

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.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

You do not change people's minds by defeating them with logic.

The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining (the more respectable word is interesting.)

I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my students will be trying to solve it; my students are likely to come in first only by having access to some knowledge or research methods the others do not have.

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.

To make interesting scientific discoveries, you should acquire as many good friends as possible who are energetic, intelligent and knowledgeable as they can be. You will find all the programs you need are stored in your friends, and will execute productively and creatively as long as you don't interfere too much.

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.

There is no use in lecturing unless a class is listening. And they will only listen if you are saying something they think they can understand and seems relevant. If you pace up and down you can tell from their moving head whether they are following you.

Coverage of material is a snare and a delusion. You begin where students are prepared to begin; and you carry them as far as you can without losing them.

although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friederich von Hayek who, in the decades after World War II, was their leading interpreter and defender. His defense did not rest primarily upon the supposed optimum attained by them but rather upon the limits of the inner environment—the computational limits of human beings:31

The greatest asset of the university has been its capacity for innovation. That capacity, in turn, rests partly on its traditions of small size, weak interdepartmental boundaries, and solid adminstrative support (or at least hunting licenses) for entrepreneurial undertakings.

We measure our success not only by the quality of teaching and research on our own campus, but by our influence on intellectual and educational trends in the nation and internationally.

Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly.

An entrepreneur is a broker between ideas and resources. This is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academia. Faculty members write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.

Artificial intelligence has had much the same effect as Darwin's theory. Both aroused in some people anxieties about their own uniqueness, value and worth.

it gets easier, not harder, to administer as you move upward in an organization.