“Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.”

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

What the joke displays is a switch in perception. This is important in changing the way we think.

I think school is a place where thinking should be taught.

Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.

What is urgent will always take precedence over what is important.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

A question is a polite way of demanding something.

I know it aches, how your heart it breaks. You can only take so much. Walk on.

The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.

The vertical thinker says: ‘I know what I am looking for.’ The lateral thinker says: ‘I am looking but I won’t know what I am looking for until I have found it.’

Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.

Thinking is the ultimate human resource. Yet we can never be satisfied with our most important skill. No matter how good we become, we should always want to be better.

Once a new idea springs into existence, it cannot be unthought. There is a sense of immortality in a new idea.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

We still seek to solve conflicts with ‘judgement’ instead of designing the way forwards.

The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.

I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.

What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.

In the final analysis, photography… is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future.

The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.