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.

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

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.

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

Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly.

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.

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.

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.

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

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

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact.

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.

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

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.

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.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

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.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

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.

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

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.

One finds limits by pushing them.

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.

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.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Architecture in general is frozen music.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

What is being called the UN 'gender architecture' is more like a shack. Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.