Models of My Life Quotes

“Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“You do not change people's minds by defeating them with logic.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my students will be trying to solve it; my students are likely to come in first only by having access to some knowledge or research methods the others do not have.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining (the more respectable word is interesting.)”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Coverage of material is a snare and a delusion. You begin where students are prepared to begin; and you carry them as far as you can without losing them.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“There is no use in lecturing unless a class is listening. And they will only listen if you are saying something they think they can understand and seems relevant. If you pace up and down you can tell from their moving head whether they are following you.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“We measure our success not only by the quality of teaching and research on our own campus, but by our influence on intellectual and educational trends in the nation and internationally.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“The greatest asset of the university has been its capacity for innovation. That capacity, in turn, rests partly on its traditions of small size, weak interdepartmental boundaries, and solid adminstrative support (or at least hunting licenses) for entrepreneurial undertakings.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“An entrepreneur is a broker between ideas and resources. This is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academia. Faculty members write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“In essence our failure was a vivid demonstration, which I have never forgotten, that theories, however plausible and “obviously” valid, can be destroyed totally by the obstinate facts of the real world. Davis had brought us an unbeatable scheme for raising cattle profitably. The cattle had a different scheme. No doubt my later deep skepticism of the a priorism of mainstream economics had some of its origins in this experience.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“When I examine my experimental research, I find to my embarrassment I rarely provided a control condition. What could I have possibly learned from these ill-designed experiments? The answer (it surprised me) is that you can test theoretical models without a control condition.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“We have adopted the policy of Sorel of propaganda of the deed. The best rhetoric comes from building and testing models and running experiments. Let philosophers weave webs of words; such webs break easily.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is interesting.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“I resolved to major in economics, until I learned that it required an accounting course. I switched to political science, which had no such requirement. (A strange beginning for someone who was later to be a founding father of a business school and a Nobel Laureate in economics.)”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“We are all Expressionists part of the time. Sometimes we just want to scream loudly at
injustice, or to stand up and be counted. These
are noble motives, but any serious revolutionist must often deprive himself of the pleasures of self-expression. He must judge his actions by their ultimate effects on institutions.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life: The Remarkable Autobiography of the Nobel Prize Winning Social Scientist and Father of Artificial Intelligence

“We invented a whole new class of computer programming languages known as list processing languages. The basic idea is that whenever a piece of information is stored in memory, additional information should be stored with it telling where to find the next associated piece of information.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“I was transformed...because I caught a glimpse of a revolutionary use for computers. We seized the opportunity to the computer as a general processor for symbols (hence thoughts) rather than just a speedy engine for arithmetic.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Though our vocabularies were different, we both view the human mind as a symbol-manipulating (my term) or information processing (Al Newell) system.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Only people who believe deeply and almost fanatically in a dream can struggle so hard with inner doubt and conflict, and without losing, in the presence of frequent disagreement on particulars, a deep sense of purpose and mutual respect.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves. If the first is more important you're roughly a Republican the second Democrat.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Students don't learn by being lectured at; then learn by thinking hard, solving problems and dissecting proofs.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“How does one instill curiosity? Without it this 'educational' process is a continual struggle between a student who is trying to get by and a teacher who is trying to catch him at it, neither profiting.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life