Herbert A. Simon

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

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

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

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.

Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe.

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. My father, an electrical engineer, had come to the United States in 1903 after earning his engineering diploma at the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany.

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

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

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

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

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 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.

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.

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

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

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

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.

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.

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.