Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves – who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.

The question is not, ‚Do you have a problem?‘ The question is, ‚Does the problem have you?‘

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

Studies have identified a significant ‚skills gap‘ between what students are currently being taught and the skills employers are seeking in today’s global economy. Our children must be better prepared than they are now to meet the future challenges of our ever-changing world.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‚What is the scientific status of the claims?‘ ‚What social or ideological needs do they serve?‘

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

Don’t find fault, find a remedy.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Initiative is doing the right things without being told.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That’s definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

I’m a good teacher and am great at observation and picking out what’s wrong and fixing it.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Information is not knowledge.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.