Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Herbert Simon
Might
Architecture
Things
Medicine
Necessary
Concerned
Short
Design
Painting
Contingent
Business
Engineering

More quotes by Herbert Simon

Image
The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
Herbert Simon
Image
A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.
Herbert Simon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact
Herbert Simon
Image
Most of what we do to get people ready to act in situations of encounter consists of drilling these lists into them sufficiently deeply so that they will be evoked quickly at the time of the decision.
Herbert Simon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
Herbert Simon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
Herbert Simon
Image
The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
Herbert Simon
Image
Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought.
Herbert Simon
Image
Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
Herbert Simon
Image
Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
Herbert Simon
Image
In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program all else is prophecy.
Herbert Simon