Herbert A. Simon

Cognitive Science American 1916 – 2001 99 quotes

A Nobel laureate who made significant contributions to cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and decision-making, co-developing early AI programs.

Quotes by Herbert A. Simon

The human mind is a limited resource.

Models of Man 1957

The world is a design problem.

The Sciences of the Artificial 1969

The computer is a tool for exploring new ideas.

The New Science of Management Decision 1960

The most important thing in life is to be happy.

Reason in Human Affairs 1983

The human mind is a pattern-matching machine.

Models of Thought 1979

The world is a system of interacting processes.

The Sciences of the Artificial 1969

The computer is a tool for making better decisions.

The New Science of Management Decision 1960

The most important thing in science is to be open-minded.

Nobel Lecture 1978

The human mind is a symbol-processing system.

Models of Thought 1979

The world is a complex adaptive system.

The Sciences of the Artificial 1969

The capacity of human beings to behave rationally is limited; that they are boundedly rational.

Book 1957

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

Article 1971

Human problem solving is a form of skilled perception.

Book 1972

The engineer is a symbol of the rational society.

Book 1960

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.

Speech 1995

Learning is any process by which a system improves performance from experience.

Book 1983

Rational behavior is behavior which is appropriate to the achievement of given goals, within the limits imposed by the situation and the capacity of the decision maker.

Book 1945

The proper way to study decision making is to study the actual decisions made by people.

Book 1969

Organizations are satisficing systems, not optimizing systems.

Book 1957

The choice of a model depends on the questions we want to answer.

Article 1979