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

If you never change your mind, why have one?

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.

Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.

The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.

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.

An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

Maybe the social value of truth is as a destination – so long as we do not assume we have arrived there.

Traditional thinking is all about “what is” Future thinking will also need to be about what can be.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

You hold onto religion, you know, rules, regulations, traditions. I think what God is interested in is people’s hearts, and that’s hard enough.

A good design is not a democratic consensus.

Every valuable creative idea must always be logical in hindsight. If it were not, we would never be able to see its value.

You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it.

We may have a perfectly adequate way of doing something, but that does not mean there cannot be a better way. So we set out to find an alternative way. This is the basis of any improvement that is not fault correction or problem solving.

Child mortality since 2000 is down by 2.65 million a year. That’s a rate of 7,256 children’s lives saved each day. It drives me nuts that most people don’t seem to know this news.

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