“Most people are put off science because maths is the gateway and they can’t handle it. What we should be teaching is operational maths because, in general, the maths we need to carry out science is pretty straightforward.”

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.

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.

We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.

America is not just a country, it’s an idea.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

I’m tired of dreaming. I’m into doing at the moment. It’s, like, let’s only have goals that we can go after.

If you do not design the future, someone or something else will design it for you.

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

Some people drift along like a cork on a river, feeling that they cannot do anything except drift, moment to moment. This is an attitude of mind. Everyone can be constructive even in tiny ways.

To be successful you have to be lucky, or a little mad, or very talented, or find yourself in a rapid growth field.

A characteristic of intuitive solutions and new ideas is that of being obvious once they are discovered.

Asking a question is the simplest way of focusing thinking asking the right question may be the most important part of thinking.

It is historical continuity that maintains most assumptions, not repeated assessment of their validity.

I do a great deal of work with young children, and if you give a child a problem, he may come up with a highly original solution, because he doesn’t have the established route to it.

It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

If we could have had in ’44, ah, let’s say three hundred operational

As interceptors. And out of this fifty, there were never more than 25 operational. So we had only a very, very few.

There’s a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.

Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance.