Herbert Simon

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

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

I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.

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.