Quotes
June Cox, et al — A generalization that bubbles up from the MacArthur Fellows' letters is that our school system, public and private, most often rewards patterns of behavior inappropriate for an independent thinker, researcher, or artist.
Charles Darwin — I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley. I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited...
Albert Einstein — I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work… Such isolation is sometimes bitter but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men… I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.
— The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Buckminster Fuller -- You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
William Gaddis — ...the main purpose of education from the start must be to stimulate questions—even those to which we’ve got no answer—rather than answering them...
Werner Heisenberg — It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.
Leta Hollingworth — The education of the best thinkers should be an education for initiative and originality. Effective originality depends, first of all, upon sound and exhaustive knowledge of what the course of preceding events has been. To take their unique places in civilized society, it would seem, therefore, that the intellectually gifted need especially to know what the evolution of culture has been.
Morton Hunt — ...our grasp of causal patterns is limited. A small minority of human beings - perhaps they are the most highly evolved - can grasp concepts and recognize patterns that the rest of us find too hard or elusive.
Jerome Kagan — ...the strong egalitarian premise in the West is unfriendly to the idea of fundamental differences in consciousness because consciousness is where will, and therefore, freedom of choice, resides.
— Children and adults are vulnerable to two habits that obstruct the generation of effective propositional solutions… first is a resistance to retiring hypotheses that have been effective in the past. A second obstacle to the generation of good solutions is failure to detect the less salient qualities of familiar events.
Joshua Lederberg — I think that that ability to move from one level of analogical reasoning to another, and not get stuck in the analogy at inappropriate times, is terribly important. You had better be able to do it. You have to be able to fantasize in rather crude ways...but then be able to shift from one frame of reference to another. That, I think is more rare than you might suppose.
John Lennon — There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn’t see. As a child I would say, ‘but this is going on!’ and everybody would look at me as if I was crazy.
John Stuart Mill — I am now convinced, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitutions of their modes of thought.
— It would not be denied by anybody that originality is a valuable element in human affairs. There is always need of persons to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices.
Nicholas Negroponte — The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas. Usually this ability resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds, and a broad spectrum of experiences.
Robert Ornstein — Conscious intuition is a faculty to select the right part of the mind for the job. This capacity to comprehend instantly and to direct the mental system is the often unrealized aim of "conscious development.”
Roger Schank -- Information is surprises. We all expect the world to work out in certain ways, but when it does, we're bored. What makes something worth knowing is organized around the concept of expectation failure. Scripts are interesting not when they work but when they fail.
Dean Keith Simonton — …creative achievers tend to discontinue their education when they feel that they have learned enough to continue on their own. They may simply become bored with formal instruction, or disenchanted with what formal institutions have to offer. …This attitude is clearly expressed by Einstein in a letter… ‘I shall not become a Ph.D. …the whole matter has become a bore to me.’
— Humans do not easily perceive patterns when relationships are obscured by noise (or random exceptions). Even fairly substantial correlations between two variables can look chaotic to all but the most discerning eye.
Robert Anton Wilson -- Every model we makes tells us how our mind works as much as it tells us about the universe.
Lewis Wolpert — Newton's reply to the question of how he discovered the law of gravity: "By thinking on it continually."