“My thinking was taught to tribes in South Africa like the Zulus and Xhosas. At the time there were about 210 fights breaking out among them every month, but after they listened to my lessons, this fell to just four.”

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.

Teaching thinking for just five hours to unemployed youngsters increased employment 500 percent.

The purpose of art is to reflect new emerging values and to define the new heroes and heroines so that people can absorb them into their perceptions.

In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.

The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas.

The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people’s minds.

A good listener is very nearly as attractive as a good talker. You cannot have a beautiful mind if you do not know how to listen.

Do we have the will to make poverty history?

To do my job well, I have to be a good listener. The listening is so much more important than the talking.

Listening is one of the lesser-known skills that mistresses offer.

I’ve got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.

John Kricfalusi is very talented; he used to really piss me off. But I did good work, you know? The Ren & Stimpy show without me was totally unsuccessful.

Listeners are kind of ambushed… if a poem just happens to be said when they’re listening to the radio. The listener doesn’t have time to deploy what I call their ‘poetry deflector shields’ that were installed in high school – there’s little time to resist the poem.

I grew up listening to the quartets and I loved that so much that I wanted to see if I could make music and make it happen. It was just a series of events … me going to concerts and saying “I think I can do that”.

I get embarrassed listening to my last CDs. I’ve got a lot of work to do, let’s put it that way.

There is nothing wrong with listening. You can listen to people; you can hear people’s concerns. You can keep an open mind and still be perfectly strong.