62 Quotes by Herbert Simon

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

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek

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

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. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.

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

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

Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly.

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

What a person cannot do he will not do, no matter how much he wants to do it. Normative economics has shown that exact solutions to the larger optimization problems of the real world are simply not within reach or sight. ... the behavior of an artificial system may be strongly influenced by the limits of its adaptive capacities.