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

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.

The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.

There’s a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don’t have to think, you just have to get more information – gets very dangerous.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all.

Don’t criticise a hypothesis, come up with a better one.

It’s always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.

The simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.

Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.

Although feelings are not supposed to intrude on business discussions, they do anyway – we just disguise them as logic.

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.

This new meta-system is very much in favor of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self.

The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

We do not make very full value of the opportunities provided by technology because we prefer critical to constructive thinking, argument to design.

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.

I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.

A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons – the least rewarded of all forms of courage.

I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself.

My only two constants are to challenge myself and to try not to repeat myself.

Repetition continues as long as you let in.

I also think I could probably repeat the commercial success; whether I want to or not is a different matter. I think there is still better work inside me.

I’ve said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him. I came to be fascinated by his studies, the products of what I call instantaneity.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.