Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

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.

Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

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