Top 35 Herbert Simon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

— Herbert Simon

2. “One finds limits by pushing them.”

— Herbert Simon

3. “Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”

— Herbert Simon

4. “Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.”

— Herbert Simon

5. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

7. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

9. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

10. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

11. “A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.”

— Herbert Simon

12. “Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

14. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

15. “The proper study of mankind is the science of design.”

— Herbert Simon

16. “Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

19. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

20. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

21. “No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.”

— Herbert Simon

22. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

24. “Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil.”

— Herbert Simon

25. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

28. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

30. “Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

32. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

33. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

34. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon

36. “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.”

— Herbert Simon

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

— Herbert Simon