Herbert A. Simon

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.

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

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

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.

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.

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.

One finds limits by pushing them.

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.

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

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.

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

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