62 Quotes by Herbert Simon

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.

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 social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the ‘hard’ sciences so brilliantly successful.

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

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring – but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

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.

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.

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren’t really very important.