Quotes from Herbert Simon

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact

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.

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.

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

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

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

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

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.

Technology may create a condition, but the questions are what do we do about ourselves. We better understand ourselves pretty clearly and we better find ways to like ourselves.

Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.

One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it.

I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

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.

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.

Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

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.

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.