A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

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 simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive.

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

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.

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.

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.