Quotations To inspire thinking

The quotations on this page are an eclectic mix, but they mostly broadly relate to Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management.

Quotations are extremely effective at capturing and concisely communicating thoughts and ideas. They can be inspirational, provoke our thinking, and, more importantly, they can help us reveal and assess the assumptions, values, and beliefs that underlie how we perceive the world.

While most of the quotes in this blook reflect my views, not all do. Some are intended as provocations to encourage deeper reflection on the subject.

A Boy Can Take You Into the Open at Night and Show You the Stars Walter Lippman - A boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars; he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that an astronomer could teach. But until and unless he feels the vast indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked maturely at the heavens. Until he has felt this, and unless…

A Cardinal Principle of Total Quality Escapes Too Many Managers Stephen Covey - A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships. | Stephen Covey

A Complex World Demands Complex Thinking Ted Cadsby - There is a gap between the complicated world we have created and the default ways we think about it. We need greater complexity in our thinking to match the complexity in our world. | Ted Cadsby

A Conversation Architect Designs Strategic Conversations David Gurteen - A conversation architect designs powerful, strategic conversations. They determine the questions to trigger the conversations and design the processes to convene and host them. | David Gurteen

A Conversation Begun in the Primeval Forests Michael Oakeshott - As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. | Michael Oakeshott

A Flaw in the Scientific Method Edward de Bono - If you are setting out to work in a new field you should thoroughly research that field. Right? Wrong! The traditional view is that you should read all that you can in order to get the base of existing knowledge and then move forward from this. There is a flaw in this argument and it is a flaw in the scientific method. We do not just get ... | Edward de Bono

A Gathering Serves Two Functions Peter Block - A new future is created when each gathering (or meeting) becomes an opportunity to deepen accountability and commitment through engagement. It doesn’t matter what the stated purpose of the gathering is. Each gathering serves two functions: (1) to address its stated purpose and (2) to be an occasion for each person to decide to become engaged as an ... | Peter Block

A Good Educational System Ivan Illich - A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at anytime in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their ... | Ivan Illich

A Good Listener Listens Slowly to What Is Being Said Edward de Bono - A good listener listens slowly to what is being said. He does not jump ahead nor does he rush to judge nor does he sit there formulating his own reply. He focuses directly on what is being said. He listens to more than is being said. He extracts the maximum information from what he hears by looking between the words used and wondering why ... | Edward de Bono

A Good Plan Violently Executed Now Is Better Than a Perfect Plan Executed Next Week George S. Patton - A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. | George S. Patton

A Human Being Is a Part of the Whole, Called by Us “universe” Albert Einstein (misquote) - A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few ... | Albert Einstein

A Leader These Days Needs to Be a Host Meg Wheatley - A leader these days needs to be a host—one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth. | Meg Wheatley

A Leader’s Greatest Challenges Richard Branson - This "us and them" problem is exacerbated by our reliance on impersonal communications technologies. One of a leader's greatest challenges these days is getting people to actually talk to each other; one-on-one meetings and old-fashioned brainstorming are vital to the success of any growing business. Improving the flow of information is just one part of the communications challenge; getting ... | Richard Branson

A Man Hears What He Wants to Hear Paul Simon - A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. | Paul Simon

A Man Is What He Thinks About All Day Long Ralph Waldo Emerson - A man is what he thinks about all day long. | Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Primary Object of Education Should Be the Science of Government George Washington - A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country? | George Washington

A Rational Approach to Politics Is to Treat Societies as Ongoing Experiments Steven Pinker - A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a ... | Steven Pinker

A Real Revolution in Culture David Bohm - Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? | David Bohm

A Small Group of Thoughtful, Committed Citizens Can Change the World Margaret Mead - Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. | Margaret Mead

A Wayshaper Does Not Direct Dave Snowden - A wayshaper does not direct. They do not impose a plan or engineer a solution. They modify the environment, the relational substrate, the information flows, and the constraints and affordances within which others will act, such that certain futures become more probable and others less so. | Dave Snowden

Abercrombie’s Thesis Melanie Abercrombie - Free group discussion is to thinking (ideas and abstractions) as handling things is to perception. | Melanie Abercrombie

Advice Is What You Get When You Are So Stupid Jordan B Peterson - Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems. | Jordan Peterson

Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers Harry Collins (2018) - No computer will be fluent in a natural language, pass a severe Turing Test and have full human-like intelligence unless it is fully embedded in normal human society. No computer will be fully embedded in human society as a result of incremental progress based on current techniques | Harry Collins

AI Is Neither Artificial nor Intelligent Kate Crawford (2022) - AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards. | Kate Crawford

Aiming Above Morality Henry David Thoreau - Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. | Henry David Thoreau

All Are Responsible Abraham Joshua Heschel - In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty; all are responsible. | Abraham Joshua Heschel

All Is Well Anthony de Mello - You know, all mystics - Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion - are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare. | Anthony de Mello

All We Need to Do Is Make Sure We Keep Talking Stephen Hawking - For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk. We learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and ... | Stephen Hawking

An Enterprise Is a Community of Human Beings, Not a Collection of Human Resources Henry Mintzberg - An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of human resources. | Henry Mintzberg

An Unexamined Life Socrates - An unexamined life is not worth living. | Socrates

Anyone Who Has a Sphere of Influence Can Be Considered a Leader Daniel Goleman - Anyone who has a sphere of influence can be considered a leader. | Daniel Goleman

Anyone Who Values Truth Should Stop Worshiping Reason Jonathan Haidt (2013) - Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason. | Jonathan Haidt

Are Leaders Born or Made? Stephen R. Covey - Are leaders born or made? This is a false dichotomy - leaders are neither born nor made. Leaders choose to be leaders. | Stephen R. Covey

Are People Untrustworthy or Is It Just Our Bad Judgement? Anthony de Mello - A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you're dealing with selfish people. You're the idiot - you glorified her, didn't you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice. They're not! They're not nice. ... | Anthony de Mello

Ask What’s Possible, Not What’s Wrong Meg Wheatley - Ask what's possible, not what's wrong. Keep asking. | Meg Wheatley

Assuming the Earth Moves and the Sun Stands Still Cardinal Bellarmine (1615) - For to say that, assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still, all the appearances are saved better than with eccentrics and epicycles, is to speak well; there is no danger in this, and it is sufficient for mathematicians. But to want to affirm that the sun really is fixed in the center of the heavens and only revolves around itself (i.e., ... | Cardinal Bellarmine

Assumptions Are the Termites of Relationships Henry Winkler - Assumptions are the termites of relationships. | Henry Winkler

Awareness and Control Anthony de Mello - What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. | Anthony de Mello

Be a Columbus of the Mind Henry David Thoreau - Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil ... | Henry David Thoreau

Be Brave Enough to Start a Conversation That Matters Meg Wheatley - Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. | Margaret Wheatley

Be Curious, Not Judgmental Often misattribted to Walt Whitman - Be curious, not judgmental. Credit: Unknown

Before You Speak, Let Your Words Pass Through Three Gates A Sufi saying - Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: At the first gate, ask yourself “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?” | Rumi

Begin with a Theory, You Begin with the Answer Eric McLuhan - Begin with a theory, you begin with the answer; begin with an observation, you begin with questions. | Eric McLuhan

Beginning to Think in a New Way Ludwig Wittgenstein - Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of ... | Ludwig Wittgenstein

Being Aware of the Present Alan Watts - What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week's meals become now." If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories ... | Alan Watts

Being Powerful Is Like Being a Lady Margaret Thatcher - Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. | Margaret Thatcher

Being Profoundly Interested in What You Think Nancy Kline - If I can be profoundly interested in what you think and what you will think next and where you will go with your thinking, you will generate ideas and insights and ways forward that you wouldn’t do without this attention. | Nancy Kline

Being Seen, Heard, Understood and Touched Virginia Satir - I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them. The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand and to touch another person. When this is done I feel contact has been made. | Virginia Satir

Being Truthful Versus Telling the Truth David Gurteen - Being truthful means honestly expressing how we perceive or feel about something, though it may not be true. Telling the truth means accurately defining or describing the way things are. | David Gurteen

Belief Coherence Daniel Kahneman - The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct. | Daniel Kahneman

Believing What You Think I Said Robert J. McCloskey - I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but, I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not really what I meant. | Robert J. McCloskey

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Critical Thinking Bertrand Russell - Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing ... | Bertrand Russell

Beyond Technology, It Is About People Ginni Rometty - What we have on our hands is not a technology issue. It's going to be a trust and people issue, particularly as we tackle problems of importance and personal impact. I'm completely convinced of it. Credit: Ginni Rometty

Biases and Critical Thinking Carol Wade - People can be extremely intelligent, have taken a critical thinking course and know logic inside and out. Yet they may just become clever debaters, not critical thinkers, because they are unwilling to look at their own biases. | Carol Wade

Boring Conversation Michel de Montaigne - There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees. | Michel de Montaigne

Build a Light-house Not a Chapel Benjamin Franklin - The bell ringing for church, we went thither immediately, and with hearts full of gratitude, returned sincere thanks to God for the mercies we had received. Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house. | Benjamin Franklin

Buildings to Encourage Collaboration Steve Jobs - If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see. | Steve Jobs

Business Is a Conversation David Weinberger - Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations. | David Weinberger

Care More Seth Godin - Care More. It's only two words, but it's hard to think of a better mantra for the organization that is smart enough to understand the core underpinning of their business, as well as one in search of a reason for being. No need to get all tied up in subcycles of this leads to this which leads to that so therefore I care... Instead, there's the ... | Seth Godin

Carl Sagan’s Dragon Carl Sagan - What's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Credit: Carl Sagan

Change Starts From Small Conversations Meg Wheatley - Very great change starts from very small conversations, held among people who care. | Meg Wheatley

Changing Minds Bernard Shaw - Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. | Bernard Shaw

Changing the Interactions Between People Dave Snowden - Changing the interactions between people is both more effective in achieving change and more ethical; telling people what sort of people you think they should be is a paternalistic form of neo-colonialism. | Dave Snowden

Changing Your Readers’ Ideas Larry McEnerney - You think that writing is communicating your ideas to your readers. It is not. What is professional writing? Professional writing, what is it? It's not conveying your ideas to your readers. It's changing their ideas. Nobody cares what ideas you have. Credit: Larry McEnerney

Chatbot Constraints David Gurteen - Chatbots are impressively capable tools that can seem almost magical, but they still have significant constraints compared to human intelligence. | David Gurteen

Chatbots Lack Nuanced Communication Skills David Gurteen - While immensely capable, chatbots have significant limitations compared to human cognition. They lack nuanced communication skills, grounded world knowledge, critical thinking, and sound judgment. Credit: David Gurteen

Chatbots Should Supplement Not Replace Human Critical Thinking David Gurteen - The goal is to use chatbots to supplement, not replace, human critical thinking and evaluation. | David Gurteen

Chatgpt’s Intelligence Is Zero Pascal Kaufmann - ChatGPT's intelligence is zero, but it's a revolution in usefulness. | Pascal Kaufmann

Choose to Be Accountable Peter Block - The power to create a future requires us to choose to be accountable. To be accountable, among other things, means you act as an owner and part creator of whatever it is that you wish to improve. In the absence of this, you are in the position of effect, not cause ... a powerless stance. To be accountable is to care for the well being of the whole ... | Peter Block

Choose to Be Audacious Enough to Take Responsibility for the Entire Human Family Werner Erhard - We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical ... | Werner Erhard

Christmas Is a Season Not Only of Rejoicing but of Reflection Winston Churchill - Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection. | Winston Churchill

Civilization and Communal Knowledge Friedrich Hayek - It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully ... | Friedrich Hayek

Clouds Not Clocks Jonah Lehrer - Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, ... | Jonah Lehrer

Community and Culture Are Not the Same David Gurteen - Community and culture are often confused. They are not the same. Organizational culture is the attitudes, customs, rituals, values, and beliefs shared by the members of an organization that govern their behavior. Every organization has a culture, good or bad, no matter what, but that does not make it a community. | David Gurteen

Community Is Much More Than Belonging to Something Brian Solis - Community is much more than belonging to something. It’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter. | Brian Solis

Communityship Is the Answer Henry Mintzberg - Isn’t it time to think of our organisations as communities of cooperation, and in so doing put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes. What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, ... | Henry Mintzberg

Complex and Complicated Systems Are Fundamentally Different Sonja Blignaut - Many people believe that complexity is just higher-order complicatedness i.e. that there is a continuum and that the difference is one of degree, not type. When one considers however how very different these states are from each other, I tend to agree with Dave Snowden when he says that there are in fact phase shifts between them i.e. they are ... | Sonja Blignaut

Complex Humans Are Mind-body-world Beings Dave Snowden - The “human” in anthro-complexity is not a disembodied mind; it is not a mechanical body nor an island entirely of itself. Complex humans are mind-body-world beings, all rolled into one. Credit: Dave Snowden

Complex Problems Aren’t Actually Problems at All Seth Godin - Complex problems aren’t actually problems at all. They are non-determinate systems, systems that change based on how we engage with them. Push on one part of a complex problem and a different part will change the system. Healthcare, climate and technology systems are all complex problems. | Seth Godin

Complex Problems Require an Entirely Different Approach in Assessment, and Action Nora Bateson - The problems the world is facing now, including ecological damage, natural disasters, poverty, species loss, political upheaval, refugee trauma, and even health epidemics, can all be described as complex, that is, they are born of circumstances that are multi-causal and non-linear. This complexity vexes the traditional problem-solving model of ... | Nora Bateson

Compliance Is Quite Different From Contribution Seth Godin - Compliance is quite different from contribution. Organized bureaucracies thrive on compliance. It makes it easier to tell people what to do. But contribution is the only way that tribes thrive, the best way to make change happen and the essence of being part of a community. It’s a shame that we spend so much time teaching our children (and our ... | Seth Godin

Connecting Beliefs and Evidence David T. Moore - Thinking — or reasoning — involves objectively connecting present beliefs with evidence in order to believe something else. Credit: David T. Moore

Connection Before Content – Without Relatedness, No Work Can Occur Peter Block - We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur. | Peter Block

Consciousness Is Everything You Experience Christof Koch - Consciousness is everything you experience. It is the tune stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate mousse, the throbbing pain of a toothache, the fierce love for your child and the bitter knowledge that eventually all feelings will end. | Christof Koch

Consider Prejudice Peter Senge - Consider prejudice. Once a person begins to accept a stereotype of a particular group, that "thought" becomes an active agent, "participating" in shaping how he or she interacts with another person who falls in that stereotyped class. In turn, the tone of their interaction influences the other person's behaviour. The prejudiced person can't see ... | Peter Senge

Contemplate the Possibility That You Have Something Very Real to Offer the World Jordan B Peterson - Contemplate the possibility that you have something very real to offer the world and that the world itself will be much less than it could be if you fail to bring that forward. | Jordan Peterson

Convening Conversations That Might Not Happen Otherwise Patricia Shaw - One of the ways of thinking about leadership is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise. | Patricia Shaw

Conversation Has a Kind of Charm About It Lucius Annaeus Seneca - Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. | Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Conversation Is a Form of Interactive, Spontaneous Communication Wikipedia - Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people. Typically it occurs in spoken communication, as written exchanges are usually not referred to as conversations. The development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization. | Wikipedia

Conversation Is King Cory Doctorow - Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about. | Cory Doctorow

Conversation Is Not a Soft Skill David Gurteen - Conversation is often treated as background noise, something that happens alongside real work. In practice, it is the work. Meaning, coordination, and trust all form in conversation. When conversation degrades, everything else follows. | David Gurteen

Conversation Is the Breath of the Curious, Learning Life Tom Peters - Conversation is the breath of the curious, learning life. | Tom Peters

Conversation Is the Most Powerful Learning Technology Ever Invented Jay Cross - Conversation is the most powerful learning technology ever invented. Conversations carry news, create meaning, foster cooperation, and spark innovation. Encouraging open, honest conversation through workspace design, setting ground rules for conversing productively, and baking conversation into the corporate culture spread intellectual capital, improve cooperation, and strengthen personal ... | Jay Cross

Conversation Is the Single Greatest Learning Tool in Your Organization William O'Brien - Conversation is the single greatest learning tool in your organization — more important than computers or sophisticated research. As a society, we know the art of small talk; we can talk about how the Red Sox are doing or where we went on vacation. But when we face contentious issues — when there are feelings about rights, or when two worthwhile ... | William O'Brien

Conversation Is the Vehicle for Change Terry Tempest Williams - Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars ... | Terry Tempest…

Conversation Is the Way That Humans Have Always Thought Together Meg Wheatley - Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the ... | Meg Wheatley

Conversation. What Is It? A Mystery! Guy de Maupassant - Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation? | Guy de Maupassant

Conversational Leadership Is an Approach to Working Together David Whyte - Conversational leadership is an approach to working together, emphasizing on the power of conversation. What are the conversations that enable and disable the quality and performance of work? As an individual, as a group or team and as an entire organization. Given the stage you are in, what are the conversations that need to stop, to start or to change? Conversational leadership does not mean ... | David Whyte

Conversational Leadership Replaces Monologue with Dialogue Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, 2012 - Conversational leadership replaces the simplicity of monologue with the unpredictable vitality of dialogue. Conversation is open and fluid rather than closed and directive. To make it work, leaders need to cultivate the art of listening to people at all levels, and speaking with them directly and authentically. | Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

Conversations Among Friends Are the Best Technology Ever Invented Nate Hagens - After basic needs are met, conversations among friends are the best technology ever invented by humans because you don't know what's coming next. There's unexpected reward. There's emergence. There's new context. There's discovery. There's curiosity. There's love. There's sharing. True human conversation has to be the most valuable thing that we have, assuming that we have a stable biosphere, food, and shelter. Credit: Nate Hagens

Conversations Are the Most Important Form of Work Alan Webber - In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work. Conversations are the way knowledge workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge in the organization. Conversations inside and outside the company are the chief mechanism for making change and renewal an ongoing part of the company's culture. One of the many paradoxes ... | Alan Webber

Conversations Occur Between Equals David Weinberger - To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human – acknowledging you don’t have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together. You can only have a conversation if you’re not afraid of being wrong. Otherwise, you’re not conversing, you’re just declaiming, speechifying, or reading what’s on the ... | David Weinberger

Conversations Overcome the Class Structure of Business David Weinberger - People implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while. | David Weinberger

Courage and Listening Winston Churchill - Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. | Winston Churchill

Critical Thinking Paradox Chris Meyer - People want you to think critically until you actually do it. | Chris Meyer

Cultivating a Healthy Organizational Culture That Naturally Evolves David Gurteen - Organizational culture emerges organically in organizations, which function as complex adaptive systems. It can't be dictated by management, but it can be influenced by improving conversational interactions among employees. By cultivating stronger connections between team members, organizations can create an environment where a healthy culture naturally evolves. | David Gurteen

Culture Is Emergent Chris Corrigan - A culture is emergent and is the result of millions of interactions, behaviours, artifacts and stories that people build up over time. It is unpredictable and results in surprise. The idea that a “culture change initiative” can be rolled out from the top of an organization is not only a myth, it’s a hidden form of colonization. And worse, the idea that people need to be changed in the way the ... | Chris Corrigan

Curiosity as the Ultimate Antidepressant Joe Moran - The most reliable antidepressant is rekindled curiosity, and only the curious try to draw bits of the world together into words. The word curious derives from the latin cura, which also gives us both cure and care. Curiosity is a cure for self-absorption, the cure being to care about the world and lay down roots in it again. Reading and writing sentences is a means of laying down these roots, of achieving absorbedness. And to…

Curiosity Evokes Concern Michel Foucault - Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional ... | Michel Foucault

Decisions Are Shaped Before They Are Made Dave Snowden - The visible leader making the decision is often doing something considerably less consequential than the network of relational and epistemic infrastructure that made that decision available, that shaped what options appeared thinkable, what coalitions existed, and what information arrived in a usable form. In communities as in organisations, the wayshaper is doing more of the causal work than the ... | Dave Snowden

Democracy Is a Conversation Yuval Noah Harari (2023) - Democray is a conversation ... Modern democracy as we know it, it's built on top of specific information technology. Once the information technology changes, it's an open question whether democracy can survive. And the biggest danger now is the opposite of what we faced in the Middle Ages.In the Middle Ages, it was impossible to have a conversation between millions of people because they just couldn't communicate. But in the 21st century, something else might…

Democracy Is a Tough Way to Live Marvin Weisbord - Democracy is a tough way to live. With all its flaws, I think it beats the alternatives. I do not wish to have someone else, no matter how educated, well-intentioned, wealthy, or wise, decide unilaterally what is best for me. Unless we are deeply involved in our work, we cannot feel good about ourselves. Unless we work with others toward valued ... | Marvin Weisbord

Democracy Is Not Perfect Winston Churchill - Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. | Winston Churchill

Democracy: Flawed Yet Indispensable David Gurteen (2024) - The paradox of democracy is that it entrusts decision-making to those least equipped to make good decisions, yet it remains the best system we have for preventing tyranny and fostering progress. Credit: David Gurteen

Dialogue Is a Disciplined Form of Conversation David Bohm - Dialogue is a disciplined form of conversation. It is an emerging process that has tremendous potential for transforming the way that people communicate and share tacit knowledge in everyday conversation. Fundamentally, when two people engage each other in dialogue they enter a conversation with a view to learn from each other rather than impose ... | David Bohm

Difference Unites Us Mary Parker Follett - As long as we think of difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it; when we think of it as that which unites us we shall cherish it. | Mary Parker Follett

Disagreeability Needs to Make a Roaring Comeback Eric Weinstein - Disagreeability needs to make a roaring comeback. | Eric Weinstein

Distinguishing Between Misinformation and Disinformation Is Crucial David Gurteen - Distinguishing between misinformation and disinformation is crucial. Misinformation comes from those who genuinely believe what they say, while disinformation involves deliberate deception, cover-ups, or the spreading of falsehoods. Differentiating between them can be challenging, and even trusted sources may inadvertently spread misinformation. | David Gurteen

Do Not Believe in Anything Simply Because … - Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you…

Doing Good Andrea Bocelli - Doing good: it is the only vocation that makes us worthy of being here as inhabitants of the world. Attempting to do good is an act of intelligence before it is a moral duty. We take our seat at the table of life just as though at a great feast, and in life, as with feasts, we do well if there is the bare minimum for everyone. And we can all do ... | Andrea…

Don’t Give Advice Peter Block - Advice is unfriendly to learning, especially when it is sought. Most of the time when people seek advice, they just want to be heard. Advice at best stops the conversation, definitely inhibits learning, and at worst claims dominance. | Peter Block

Don’t Try to Force a Child to Do What He Is Afraid to Do John Holt - If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him. | John Holt

Don’t Ask Kids What They Want to Be When They Grow Up Jaime Casap - Don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up but what problems do they want to solve. This changes the conversation from who do I want to work for, to what do I need to learn to be able to do that. | Jaime Casap

Each Man Is Questioned by Life Viktor Frankl - Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible. | Viktor Frankl

Embracing Complexity Can Actually Makes Things Easier, Simpler, and More Straightforward Jean Boulton - What is easy to miss in saying all this is that embracing complexity can actually makes things easier, simpler, and more straightforward! How much time gets spent by organizations making cases, forming detailed plans, completing analyses, and demonstrating outcomes? How much of this really gets to the heart of the situation and really determines ... | Jean Boulton

Emptying Assumptions Hannah Arendt - Real thinking is not a process of accumulating ideas, but of emptying out assumptions. | Hannah Arendt

Encouraging a Leader in Every Chair Amy Edmondson - People sit in a circle, with the intention of de-emphasizing hierarchies and instead encouraging what's called “a leader in every chair". To create the mindfulness and focus conducive to an environment where everyone collaborates and contributes, meetings begin with a minute of silence. | Amy Edmondson

Establishing the Truth Michel de Montaigne - I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it. | Michel de Montaigne

Everybody Believes They’re the Good Guy Amaryllis Fox - Everybody believes they're the good guy. | Amaryllis Fox

Excited Conversation Ralph Waldo Emerson - In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours. | Ralph Waldo Emerson

Extrinsic Tangible Rewards Undermine Intrinsic Motivation New Scientist - Economists and workplace consultants regard it as almost unquestioned dogma that people are motivated by rewards, so they don’t feel the need to test this. It has the status more of religious truth than scientific hypothesis. The facts are absolutely clear. There is no question that in virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards ... | New Scientist

Fear and Love Anthony de Mello - "What is love?" "The total absence of fear," said the Master. "What is it we fear?" "Love," said the Master. | Anthony de Mello

Fools’ Certainty Bertrand Russell - The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. | Bertrand Russell

For All Our Knowledge, We Have No Idea What We’re Talking About David Weinberger - For all our knowledge, we have no idea what we're talking about. We don't understand what's going on in our business, our market, and our world. Knowledge Management shouldn't be about helping us to know more. It should be about helping us to understand. So, how do we understand things? It's through stories that we understand how the world works. | David Weinberger

For Some of Our Most Important Beliefs, We Have No Evidence at All Daniel Kahneman - For some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential. | Daniel Kahneman

For the Human Species to Evolve, the Conversation Must Deepen Margaret Mead - For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen. | Margaret Mead

Freedom of Speech Is Not Just Another Value Jordan B Peterson - I don’t believe that freedom of speech is just another value. I think that is preposterous. I think that if you claim that then you know nothing about western civilization and history. Freedom of speech is not just another principle, it is the mechanism by which we keep our psyches and our societies organized and we have to be unbelievably careful ... | Jordan Peterson

Freethinkers’ Mindset Leo Tolstoy - Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for critical thinking. | Leo Tolstoy

Gadfly Socrates - So now, Athenian men, more than on my own behalf must I defend myself, as some may think, but on your behalf, so that you may not make a mistake concerning the gift of god by condemning me. For if you kill me, you will not easily find another such person at all, even if to say in a ludicrous way, attached on the city by the god, like on a large ... | Socrates

Generally Agreeing or Disagreeing with Others Is Largely a Matter of Habit Friedrich Nietzsche - Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other. | Friedrich Nietzsche

Good Conversation Paula Marantz Cohen - Good conversation mixes opinions, feelings, facts, and ideas in an improvisational exchange with one or more individuals in an atmosphere of goodwill. It inspires mutual insight, respect, and, most of all, joy. It is a way of relaxing the mind, opening the heart, and connecting, authentically with others. To converse well is surprising, ... | Paula Marantz Cohen

Grading the Whole Surface of the Planet Henry David Thoreau - One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety ... | Henry David Thoreau

Greed Has Poisoned Men’s Souls Charlie Chaplin - Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will…

Have More Conversations with People Whom You Disagree Oprah Winfrey - And even though this is the college where Facebook was born, my hope is that you would try to go out and have more face-to-face conversations with people you may disagree with. That you'll have the courage to look them in the eye and hear their point of view. And help make sure that the speed and distance and anonymity of our world doesn't cause ... | Oprah Winfrey

History Isn’t the Study of the Past Yuval Noah Harari - History isn't the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change. | Yuval Noah Harari

Hitchens’s Razor Christopher Hitchens - Hitchens's Razor: What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Credit: Christopher Hitchens

How Can You Recognize Communityship? Henry Mintzberg - How can you recognize communityship? That’s easy. You have found it when you walk into an organization and are struck by the energy in the place, the personal commitment of the people and their collective engagement in what they are doing. These people don’t have to be formally empowered because they are naturally engaged. The organization ... | Henry Mintzberg

How Have I Contributed to the Current Reality? Peter Block - Accountabilty is the willingness to acknowledge that we have participated in creating, through comission or ommision, the conditions that we wish to see changed. Without this capacity to see ourselves as cause, our efforts become either coercive or wishfully dependent on the transformation of others. Community will be created the moment we decide to act as creators of what it can become. This ... | Peter Block

How Leadership Begins Peter Block - Leadership begins with understanding that every gathering is an opportunity to deepen accountability and commitment through engagement. It doesn’t matter what the stated purpose of the gathering is. Each gathering serves two functions: to address its stated purpose, its business issues; and to be an occasion for each person to decide to become ... | Peter Block

How Little You Know Walter Ong - Few people know how much you have to know in order to know how little you know. Credit: Walter Ong

How to Make Amends for Derogatory Speech Unknown - One man spread a rumor about another. He later felt regret and went to the rabbi to ask how to make amends. “Go to the store and buy a bag of seeds,” said the rabbi, “then go to a big open field and scatter the seeds into the wind. Do so and report back to me in a week.” The man did as he was told and came back the next week to find out…

How We See Things Anthony de Mello - We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. | Anthony de Mello

Humor Is the Great Thing, the Saving Thing Mark Twain - Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place. | Mark Twain

I Believe We Can Change the World If We Start Listening to One Another Again Meg Wheatley - I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again. Simple, honest, human conversation. Not mediation, negotiation, problem-solving, debate, or public meetings. Simple, truthful conversation where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard, and we each listen well. | Meg Wheatley

I Do Not Pretend to Start with Precise Questions Bertrand Russell - 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. | Bertrand Russell

I Don’t Explain, I Explore Marshall McLuhan - “I don’t explain, I explore.” “I don’t have concepts, only percepts.” “You don’t like that idea? I’ve got others.” “I don’t see any point in making statements that aren’t controversial.” “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.” | Marshall McLuhan

I Have a Foreboding Carl Sagan - Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public ... | Carl Sagan

I Have No Doctrine, I Carry on a Dialogue Martin Buber - I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue. | Martin Buber

I Have No Special Talents. I Am Only Passionately Curious Albert Einstein - I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. | Albert Einstein

I Like Coincidences Chuck Sigars - I like coincidences. They make me wonder about destiny, and whether free will is an illusion or just a matter of perspective. They let me speculate on the idea of some master plan that, from time to time, we're allowed to see out of the corner of our eye. | Chuck Sigars

I Would Still Plant My Apple Tree Unknown - Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. | Martin Luther

Idealistic Verses Naturalistic Approach to Business Dave Snowden - In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the "learning organization". ... | Dave Snowden

Ideas as Toys Robert Greene - When it comes to the ideas and opinions you hold, see them as toys or building blocks that you are playing with. Some you will keep, others you will knock down, but your spirit remains flexible and playful. | Robert Greene

If Everyone Is Thinking Alike, Then Somebody Isn’t Thinking George S. Patton - If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. | George Patton

If Everything Must Have a Cause, Then God Must Have a Cause Bertrand Russell (1927) - If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian…

If I Had an Hour to Solve a Problem Albert Einstein - If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. | Albert Einstein

If It’s Clear and Useless – It’s Useless Larry McEnerney - If it's clear and useless, it's useless. It's organized and useless, it's useless. It's persuasive and useless, it's useless. That's the way it is. | Larry McEnerney

If We Cannot Say “no” Then “yes” Has No Meaning Peter Block - Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no.” If we cannot say “no” then “yes” has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations without having to justify them or move quickly into problem-solving. “No” is the beginning of the ... | Peter Block

If We Put Ourselves in Order, Perhaps We Will Do the Same for the World Jordan Peterson - The more people sort themselves out, the more responsibility they will take for the world around them and the more problems they will solve. If we put ourselves in order, perhaps we will do the same for the world. | Jordan Peterson

If You Value Conversation, You Will Make Time for It David Gurteen - Don't use the excuse that you don't have time to talk. If you value conversation, you will make time for it. | David Gurteen

If You Want to Know a Man, Watch Him Laugh Fyodor Dostoyevsky - If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man. Credit: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If You’re Thinking Without Writing, You Only Think You’re Thinking Leslie Lamport - If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking. | Leslie Lamport

Ignorance Is Simply a Lack of Understanding David Gurteen - Calling someone ignorant isn’t necessarily an insult. Ignorance is simply a lack of understanding. If we are ignorant of a subject, we have little, if any, information or knowledge about it. We are ignorant about all sorts of things, but that does not make us stupid; we are just ignorant. This is a crucial distinction. | David Gurteen

Imagine a Culture Where an Argument Is Viewed as a Dance George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen - Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be ... | George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen

Implicit Knowledge Isn’t There the Way Ore Is Buried David Weinberger - Implicit knowledge isn't explicit knowledge that we're not currently thinking about. Implicit knowledge isn't there the way ore is buried. It's "there" only in the sense that we can generate it when required. Most simply: That we can come up with an answer doesn't mean that the answer was lying dormant in us all along. Answering questions is a ... | David Weinberger

In a Conversation the Participants Are Not Engaged in an Inquiry Michael Oakeshott - In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a ... | Michael Oakeshott

In Complexity We Start Journeys with a Sense of Direction Dave Snowden - I have long argued, and repeated ad nauseam that in complexity we start journeys with a sense of direction we don’t try and achieve goals. We remain open to the evolutionary opportunities of the here and now, the present and the adjacent future states. | Dave Snowden

In Order to Be Able to Think, You Have to Risk Being Offensive Jordan B. Peterson - In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. Credit: Jordan B. Peterson

In the Knowledge Age, Leadership Is a Choice Stephen R. Covey - In the industrial age, leadership was a position. In the knowledge age, leadership is a choice. | Stephen R. Covey

In the Space Between Stimulus and Response Lies Our Freedom to Choose Stephen Covey - In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices, but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the ... | Stephen R. Covey

Individuals Expect and Demand a Voice in Decisions That Affect Their Lives Daniel Yankelovich - Today, cultural and legal changes mean that individuals expect and demand a voice in decisions that affect their lives and often they have the power to undermine those decisions if they aren't allowed their voice. | Daniel Yankelovich

Information Does Not Constitute Knowledge David Gurteen - When we take knowledge that resides within the human mind and record it in written form, it is transformed into information. This information does not constitute knowledge. It requires a person - a "knower" - to interpret and process the written words, converting the information back into knowledge within their own mind. | David Gurteen

Information Informs David Gurteen - Information informs. If it does not, it is not information. | David Gurteen

Information Is a Difference That Makes a Difference Gregory Bateson (1970) - What is a difference, that makes a difference? It is an elementary idea, a basic unit of information. The unit of information is a difference, which makes a difference. | Gregory Bateson

Initiating a New Order of Things Nicolo Machiavelli - It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly ... | Nicolo Machiavelli

Inspire Others to Dream John Quincy Adams - If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. | John Quincy Adams

Intellectual Humility Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt - Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right. | Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

Intelligence: an Emergent System’s Ability to Respond to Its Environment Richard Yonck - Intelligence: An emergent system’s ability to respond to its environment in order to improve its conditions, perpetuate itself and maximize its future freedom of action. | Richard Yonck

Inventing the Future Requires Giving Up Control George Land - Inventing the future requires giving up control. No one with a compelling purpose and a great vision knows how it will be achieved. One has to be willing to follow an unknown path, allowing the road to take you where it will. Surprise, serendipity, uncertainty and the unexpected are guaranteed on the way to the future. | George Land

Is Knowledge Knowable? Woody Allen - Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this? | Woody Allen

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics Isaac Asimov - 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. | Isaac Asimov

It Has Been Said That Man Is a Rational Animal Bertrand Russell - It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. | Bertrand Russell

It Is in Speaking That We Organize Cognitively What We Know David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson - In these meetings individuals exchange their data, conclusions, reasoning and questions with others. Although the cognitive benefits to the receiver of such an exchange are apparent, there is evidence that it is the speaker who makes the greatest cognitive gains from the exchange. Individuals organize information differently if they are going to present it to others than if they are trying to ... | David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson

It Is Our Task to Transform Ourselves From Social Creatures Into Community Creatures Scott Peck - We know the rules of community; we know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives. If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world? We human beings have often been referred to as social animals. But we are not yet community creatures. We are ... | Scottt Peck

It Is Time to Stop Waiting for Someone to Save Us Meg Wheatley - It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation — that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice — and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities. | Meg Wheatley

It’s Not Differences That Divide Us Meg Wheatley - It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do. | Meg Wheatley

It’s OK Not to Have an Opinion Richard Feynman - Did you know that it’s actually possible for you to say “I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion". | Richard Feynman

It’s Up to Us to Decide on the Kind of Conversations We Have Theodore Zeldin - It's up to us to decide on the kind of conversations we have. The way we talk at the office or factory shapes the work we do; it's not just machines which force us to be obedient. I want to show how we could make our work a lot less boring and frustrating if we learned to talk differently. | Theodore Zeldin

It’s Less About Strategy or Technology and It’s More About Psychology John Hagel - Over time I have come to realize that actually it’s much less about strategy or technology and it’s much more about psychology. That if we don’t understand what motivates people, if we don’t understand their emotions, their fears, their hopes, their aspirations, the best strategy is just going to sit on the shelf and the best technology will ... | John Hagel

Jealousy Is Invariably a Symptom of Neurotic Insecurity Robert Heinlein - A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity. | Robert Heinlein

Killing Time Erich Fromm - Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly, yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except to kill it. | Erich Fromm

Knowing How to Listen Plutarch - Know how to listen and you will profit even from those who talk badly. | Plutarch

Knowing Your Readers Larry McEnerney - If you do not know your readers, the particular people in a community, if you do not know these people, you are very unlikely to create value and you are very unlikely to be persuasive because persuasion depends on what they doubt. If you don't know what they doubt, how on earth you're gonna overcome those doubts? You must know them. | Larry McEnerney

Knowledge Alone Is Not Power David Gurteen - Knowledge alone is not power. Self-motivation, taking responsibility, and the ability to act on knowledge and to influence and work with people, especially those in authority, is power. | David Gurteen

Knowledge Is an Expression of Shared Responsibilities Jeremy Rifkin - The traditional assumption that “knowledge is power” and is used for personal gain is being subsumed by the notion that knowledge is an expression of the shared responsibilities for the collective well-being of humanity and the planet as a whole. | Jeremy Rifkin

Knowledge Is Given When It Is Needed Dave Snowden - If you ask someone, or a body for specific knowledge in the context of a real need it will never be refused. If you ask them to give you your knowledge on the basis that you may need it in the future, then you will never receive it. | Dave Snowden

Knowledge Is Happiness Helen Keller (1903) - Knowledge is power. Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life. Credit: Helen Keller

Knowledge Is Not a Commodity to Be Stored and Retrieved David Griffiths (2023) - Knowledge is not a commodity to be stored and retrieved; it is a living, breathing entity birthed from the intricate dance of human interaction. It is a vibrant tapestry woven from the threads of human and non-human actors, engaged in a dynamic, ever-evolving network of collaboration and competition. People are not footnotes in this narrative; we are the heart and soul of KM. | David Griffiths

Knowledge Is Not Power David Gurteen - Knowledge is not power. The ability to influence people, especially those in authority, is power. | David Gurteen

Knowledge Is the Capacity for Effective Action Peter Senge - Knowledge is the capacity for effective action. There is no capacity for effective action in a database. | Peter Senge

Knowledge Management Is a Bullshit Issue Michael Schrage - I think "knowledge management" is a bullshit issue. Let me tell you why. I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and it won't change your behavior one iota. People choose not to change their behavior because the culture and the imperatives of the organization make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge. Knowledge ... | Michael Schrage

Knowledge Management Is Not Enough David Gurteen - Knowledge Management helps us organise and share information, but it cannot do the thinking for us. Knowledge only comes alive when people talk, question, and reason together. By practising Conversational Leadership, we build on Knowledge Management and actively engage our collective intelligence. | David Gurteen

Knowledge Management Should Deal with the Evolutionary Possibilities of the Present Dave Snowden - Knowledge Management should be focused on real, tangible intractable problems not aspirational goals. It should deal pragmatically with the evolutionary possibilities of the present rather than seeking idealistic solutions. | Dave Snowden

Knowledge Only Exists in the Mind David Gurteen - Knowledge only exists in the mind. | David Gurteen

Knowledge Sharing Is Your Job. Do It! Bob Buckman - Our approach to Knowledge Management is far more than stick or carrot. We say, “Knowledge Sharing is your job. Do it! As a reward, you may keep your job.” | Bob Buckman

Language Is Not Merely a Body of Vocabulary Wade Davis - Language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, the means by which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the … mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. | Wade Davis

Leadership and Social Influence David Gurteen - Leadership is the ability of an individual, through social influence, to enlist the support and cooperation of others in achieving common goals and in building and sustaining a community. | David Gurteen

Leadership Happens Between People David Gurteen - Leadership is usually framed as a role or a position. It shows up more reliably in moments of interaction. In how questions are asked, how listening happens, and how difference is handled. Leadership lives between people, not above them. | David Gurteen

Leadership Is a Group Sport, Not an Individual Heroic Activity Edgar Schein - In an increasingly complex world, appointed leaders simply don't know enough to decide what is new and better. Leadership is a group sport, not an individual heroic activity. | Edgar Schein

Leadership Is a Practice Ronald Heifetz - Distinguishing leadership from authority helps us begin to see that if we understand leadership as a practice, as an activity, then it becomes available to anybody high or low, any place or position. | Ronald Heifetz

Leadership Is Not About Being the Loudest in the Room Jacinda Ardern - To me, leadership is not about necessarily being the loudest in the room, but instead being the bridge, or the thing that is missing in the discussion and trying to build a consensus from there. | Jacinda Ardern

Leadership Is Not Simply Something We Do Kevin Cashman - Leadership is not simply something we do. It comes from somewhere inside us. Leadership is a process, an intimate expression of who we are. It is our being in action. Our being, our personhood, says as much about us as a leader as the act of leading itself. | Kevin Cashman

Leadership Is the Capacity of a Human Community to Shape Its Future Peter Senge - Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future. | Peter Senge

Learning From Others Scott H. Young - You think for yourself first by learning a lot of the thoughts of other people. Other thoughts and ideas don't pollute originality and independence, they create the preconditions for it. Credit: Scott H. Young

Learning Is All About Connections Peter Senge - Learning is all about connections, and through our connections with unique people we are able to gain a true understanding of the world around us. | Peter Senge

Let Go of Certainty Tony Schwartz - Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow. | Tony Schwartz

Let the Bird Sing Ralph Waldo Emerson - Let the bird sing without deciphering the song. | Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let the Conversation Flow at Its Own Pace Max Weiss - Let the conversation flow at its own pace, don’t try to rush it or control it. You need to let go and be part of the conversation. Credit: Max Weiss

Leveraging Chatbots to Aid Critical Thinking Skills David Gurteen - By interacting with chatbots in innovative ways that encourage examining issues from different perspctives, we can sharpen our critical thinking skills. | David Gurteen

Life Has Meaning with Responsibility Jordan B Peterson - Life has meaning with responsibility. The more responsibility you take on the more meaning your life has. | Jordan B Peterson

Life Is Difficult Scott Peck - Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. | Scott Peck

Life, Smoke, Wind and Sky Al Stewart (1993) - I still sometimes get caught up in the past I can't say why. All our lives are just a smudge of smoke or just a breath of wind against the sky. | Al Stewart

Like Any Living System, Every Organization Co-evolves Meg Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers - Like any living system, every organization co-evolves. Its character and capabilities emerge as it plays with possibilities. It messes about with others until a workable system appears. This system has abilities and beliefs no one planned. It accomplishes work in ways no one designed. It has relationships no one mandated. While we worry about designs and structures, tweak procedures and rules, ... | Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

Listen with the Intent to Understand Not to Reply Stephen R. Covey - Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. | Stephen Covey

Listening Is an Act of Creation David Gurteen - How we listen shapes what emerges in a conversation. Listening deeply allows new insights and ideas to surface, while interrupting or rushing to conclusions stifles exploration. Listening creates the space where real learning happens. | David Gurteen

Listening Is Not a Passive Act, It Is a Very Powerful Action Nancy Kline - Listening is not a passive act, it is a very powerful action. | Nancy Kline

Listening to Others’ Experiences Stimulates Memories and Ideas Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor - Listening to others’ verbalized experiences stimulates memories, ideas, and experiences in participants. This is also known as the group effect where group members engage in “a kind of ‘chaining’ or ‘cascading’ effect; talk links to, or tumbles out of, the topics and expressions preceding it” | Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor

Listening to See Where You Will Go Next Nancy Kline - I want to be listening in a way that is more interested in where you will go next than I am in what I am going to say next. | Nancy Kline

Loneliness Is Not Cured by Human Company Anthony de Mello - Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality. | Anthony de Mello

Long-term Planning Is Irrelevant, If Not a Hindrance Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge - Long-term planning is irrelevant, if not a hindrance. Strategy should not be about the realisation of prior intent, but rather emphasis on the importance of openness to accident, coincidence and serendipity. Strategy in this case is the emergent resultant. Successful strategies, especially in the long term, do not result from fixing an ... | Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge

Loss of Distinction Hannah Arendt - The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. | Hannah Arendt

Love and Compassion Are Necessities, Not Luxuries Dalai Lama - Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. | Dalai Lama

Love Is the Answer Elon Musk - It may seem corny, but love is the answer. | Elon Musk

Making Better Sense of the World David Gurteen - To make better sense of the world, improve decision making, strategizing, and innovation we need to convene small groups of people to engage in creative conversations triggered by powerful questions. | David Gurteen

Man Is Condemned to Be Free Jean-Paul Sartre - Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts ... | Jean-Paul Sartre

Man Is Not a Rational Animal; He Is a Rationalizing Animal Robert Heinlein - Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal. | Robert Heinlein

Man No Longer Saw the World as a God-given Reality Egon Friedell - [As a result of the Enligtenment ] Man no longer saw the world as a God-given reality, but as a site of possibility for everything that could be useful, charitable and life-promoting, an immense field of operation for the pursuit and enhancement of the forces of pure reason, which dares to do anything, is fearful of nothing and cannot be disappointed by anything. | Egon Friedell

Many People Have Not Really Experienced Synergy in Their Lives Stephen Covey - Many people have not really experienced even a moderate degree of synergy in their family life or in other interactions. They’ve been trained and scripted into defensive and protective communications or into believing that life and other people can’t be trusted. This represents one of the great tragedies and wastes in life, because so much ... | Stephen Covey

Marketing Is About Values Steve Jobs - Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear what we want them to know about us. One of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet…

Mass Cynicism Hannah Arendt - In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every ... | Hannah Arendt

May You Live in Interesting Times Unknown - May you live in interesting times. | Unknown

Meaning Without Definition Hannah Arendt - Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. | Hannah Arendt

Men Will Believe What They See. Let Them See Henry David Thoreau - If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see. | Henry David Thoreau

Mindset Change Smacks of Indoctrination Dave Snowden - Stop the paternalistic attempt to define how people think and engineer a XYZ culture and instead focus on creating and disrupting connections and engaging people in small actions in the here and now. Mindset change smacks of indoctrination. | Dave Snowden

Misuse of Our Power Peter Block - It is a misuse of our power to take responsibility for solving problems that belong to others. | Peter Block

Moral Reasoning Is Generally Done Post-hoc Jonathan Haidt - My research examines the intuitive foundations of morality. I have found that moral reasoning is generally done post-hoc, to search for confirmation of our fast, automatic intuitive responses. I am therefore skeptical of the power of reasoning to bring us to the right conclusions, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in ... | Jonathan Haidt

Most Conversations Are Simply Monologues Margaret Millar - Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses. | Margaret Millar

Most People Don’t Live Aware Lives Anthony de Mello - Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts — generally somebody else's — mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. | Anthony de Mello

Most People Think of Leadership as a Position Stephen R. Covey - Most people think of leadership as a position and therefore don’t see themselves as leaders. | Stephen Covey

Motivation Is a Fire From Within Stephen Covey - Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly. | Stephen Covey

My Business Is to Do My Thing, to Dance My Dance Anthony de Mello - Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That’s the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I’m going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to…

Natural Verses Artificial Intelligence David Gurteen - Natural intelligent beings evolve through natural selection, while artificial intelligent entities evolve through intentional design by those same intelligent beings. Credit: David Gurteen

Nature Is an Integrated Process of Immense Complexity Alan Watts - The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune. | Alan Watts

Never Give In. Never Give In. Never, Never, Never, Never Winston Churchill - Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | Winston Churchill

Never Help: Fixing People Is a Form of Colonialism Peter Block - Never help: (all fixing people is a form of colonialism). | Peter Block

Newspapers Without a Government Thomas Jefferson - The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & ... | Thomas Jefferson

No Man Is an Island John Donne - No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friends's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the…

No Truth Is Without Some Mixture of Error Wilbur Wright - No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error, he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some errors with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and…

Not Questioning and Challenging Our Beliefs Is a Formula for Vulnerability John Hagel - Rather than constantly questioning and challenging our beliefs and being willing to think differently about the opportunities that are out there, we withdraw into what we've done before. And in a world that's rapidly changing, that's a formula for vulnerability. | John Hagel

Nothing Betrays Character Like Laughter Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at. Credit: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nurturing a Community David Gurteen - If you nurture something such as a child or a young plant, you care for it while it grows and develops. Nurturing a community is not something you do directly, but instead you nurture the relationships between the people within it. | David Gurteen

On a Long Life Benjamin Franklin - A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough. Credit: Benjamin Franklin

On Becoming Change Mahatma Gandhi - We must become the change we want to see in the world. | Mahatma Gandhi

On Becoming Silent About Things Martin Luther King Jr. - Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. | Martin Luther King Jr.

On Being Somebody Lily Tomlin - I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. | Lily Tomlin

On Evil Scott Peck - There really are people and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so. They do this not with conscious malice but blindly, lacking awareness of their own evil — indeed, seeking to avoid any such awareness. As has been described of the devil in religious literature, they hate the light and instinctively will do…

One of the Ironies of Speaking Up Amy Edmondson - One of the ironies of speaking up is that, to the individual who makes the choice to withhold his or her knowledge in a meeting, that small act might seem insignificant. Yet, when such choices are repeatedly made in hundreds of meetings across an organization, the loss of knowledge significantly reduces the organization’s ability to act ... | Amy Edmondson

One Person Always Loves More Max in the film Nowhere in Africa (2001) - One person always loves more. That's what makes it so difficult. And the one who loves more is vulnerable. Credit: Max in the film Nowhere in Africa

One Single Anne Frank Primo Levi - One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live. | Primo Levi

Only a Community of Minds Can Show Us the Truth Timothy Wilken - We each view reality from our own unique perspective, only a community of minds can show us the truth. | Timothy Wilken

Only Individuals Making Quality Decisions Will Improve the World Robert M. Pirsig - My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place ... | Robert M. Pirsig

Open Mind Vulnerability Terry Pratchett - The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. | Terry Pratchett

Operating Without Hierarchy Rosabeth Moss Kanter - The new kind of business hero must learn to operate without the might of the hierarchy behind them. The crutch of authority must be thrown away and replaced by their own ability to make relationships, use influence and work with others to achieve results. | Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Organizational Culture Is the Basic Tacit Assumptions About the World Edgar Schein - Organizational culture is the basic tacit assumptions about how the world is and ought to be that a group of people share and that determines their perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and, their overt behavior. | Edgar Schein

Organizations as Dynamic Webs of Conversation Juanita Brown and David Isaacs - Conversational leadership takes root when leaders see their organizations as dynamic webs of conversation and consider conversation as a core process for effecting positive systemic change. Taking a strategic approach to this core process can not only grow intellectual and social capital, but also provide a collaborative advantage in our ... | Juanita Brown & David Isaacs

Organizations Live or Die in the Swarm Kenneth Gergen - Organizations live or die in the swarm of daily interchange in complimenting and criticizing, passing and retaining information, smiling and frowning, asking and answering, demanding and resisting, controlling and consenting. What injects meaning into one's work is derived neither from the individual alone, nor environmental forces, but from ... | Kenneth Gergen

Our Beliefs Are Not Isolated Pieces of Data That We Can Take and Discard at Will Steven Sloman - Our beliefs are not isolated pieces of data that we can take and discard at will. Instead, beliefs are deeply intertwined with other beliefs, shared cultural values, and our identities. To discard a belief means discarding a whole host of other beliefs, forsaking our communities, going against those we trust and love, and in short, challenging our ... | Steven Sloman

Our Beliefs Are Not Properly Shaped by Healthy Scrutiny and Debate Thomas Gilovich - Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do. | Thomas Gilovich

Our Deepest Fear Marianne Williamson - Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other ... | Marianne…

Our Faith in Love and Justice Calls Upon Us to Build a Better World Andrea Bocelli - Our faith in love and justice calls upon us to build a better world than the one we have found. It calls upon us to give back to the world all the good things we have received, so the less fortunate or most vulnerable members of our society get a chance to achieve a life full of opportunity and beauty. So those who take up the challenge will find ... | Andrea Bocelli

Our Most Effective Knowledge Management Tool Is Conversation Nancy Dixon - Our most effective knowledge management tool is conversation. The words we choose, the questions we ask, and the metaphors we use to explain ourselves are what determine our success in creating new knowledge as well as sharing that knowledge with each other. | Nancy Dixon

Our Society Is Dangerously Polarised Munk Debates - Our society is dangerously polarised. We don’t listen to each other. Too many of us are separating into ideological tribes. This has to stop. The future of our democracy depends on it. This is what the Munk Debates is all about. Opening minds to different points of view. Challenging groupthink. Debating controversial issues with rigour and honesty. | Munk Debates

Our Spoken Language Enables Us to Think Together David Gurteen - Our spoken language allows us to do more than just share information — it enables us to think and reason together. | David Gurteen

Overthinking Madness Alan Watts - Most of us think compulsively all the time. That is to say we talk to ourselves. And I remember when I was a boy we had a common saying: 'Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness'. | Alan Watts

Ownership Not Buy-in Group Jazz - Ownership is when you own or share the ownership of an idea, a decision, an action plan, a choice. It means that you have participated in its development; that it is your choice freely made. Buy-in is the exact opposite. Someone else, or some group of people, has done the development, the thinking and the deciding, and now they have to convince ... | Engaging Everyone with Liberating Structures

Passionate Opinions Bertrand Russell - The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. | Bertrand Russell

People Dedicated to the Truth Live in the Open Scott Peck - By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear. | Scott Peck

People Don’t Resist Change They Resist Being Changed Peter Senge - People don't resist change; they resist being changed. | Peter Senge

People Have Some Crazy Opinions Steven Sloman - People have some crazy opinions. Generally, these are the opinions that we disagree with. The standard view in both academia and the wider culture is that people have such opinions due to knowledge deficits; they are lacking information. On this view, providing information and critical reasoning skills is the best way to get opinions to converge, ... | Steven Sloman

People Mistakenly Assume That Their Thinking Is Done by Their Head Anthony de Mello - People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it. | Anthony de Mello

People, Play and Conversation Plato - You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. | Plato

Perils of Absolute Certainty Peter Boghossian - Few things are more dangerous than people who think they’re in possession of absolute truth. | Peter Boghossian

Philosophy and Critical Thinking Nassim Nicholas Taleb - It is lacking in critical thinking to think that studying philosophy will improve your critical thinking. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Plans Are Worthless, but Planning Is Everything Dwight Eisenhower - Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. | Dwight Eisenhower

Pleasant and Painful Experiences Anthony de Mello - Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. | Anthony de Mello

Please Stop Saying You Researched It Linda Gamble Spadaro - Please stop saying you researched it. You didn’t research anything and it is highly probable you don’t know how to do so. Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on the reported results? No? Did you at least take each article one by one and look into the source (that would be the author,…

Politics at Its Best Is a Practical Activity Rory Stewart - I felt that politics at its best is a practical activity, not an ideology — a continual exercise of compassion, and grip, and competence, trying as best as you can to do a dozen small things for each problem in turn. | Rory Stewart

Politics Is Life Tom Peters - Politics is life. Politics is the basis for real can do, as opposed to the imaginary sort brought to you by “strong leaders.” | Tom Peters

Power of Questions Neil Postman - Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. | Neil Postman

Power Over Mind Marcus Aurelius - You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. | Marcus Aurelius

Powerful Questions Evoke a Choice for Accountability and Commitment Peter Block - Powerful questions are those that, in the answering, evoke a choice for accountability and commitment. | Peter Block

Predicting or Controlling a Conversation Peter Block - We think that if we can control or predict how a conversation will go, it will improve its quality and get us what we want. The penchant for planning our encounters is a distrust of ourselves and each other as spontaneous beings. | Peter Block

Problems Only Exist in the Human Mind Anthony de Mello - Problems only exist in the human mind. | Anthony de Mello

Productive Disagreement Depends on How People Feel About Each Other Ian Leslie - Productive disagreement depends on how people feel about each other. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to argue, and not enough on how to shape the relationship that will define how the engagement goes. It’s often said that in order to disagree well, people need to put emotions aside and think purely rationally, but this is a myth. ... | Ian Leslie

Proselytism Is Solemn Nonsense Pope Francis - Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The ... | Pope Francis

Psychological Safety Is a Belief That One Will Not Be Punished for Speaking Up Amy Edmondson - Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. | Amy Edmondson

Public Discourse Is Like Having a Fight Deborah Tannen - Our public interactions have become more and more like having an argument with a spouse. Conflict can't be avoided in our public lives any more than we can avoid conflict with people we love. One of the great strengths of our society is that we can express these conflicts openly. But just as spouses have to learn ways of settling their differences without inflicting real damage on each other, so ... | Deborah Tannen

Questions Are More Transforming Than Answers Peter Block - Questions are more transforming than answers. The skill is getting the questions right. The traditional conversations that seek to explain, study, analyze, define tools, and express the desire to change others are interesting but not powerful. Questions open the door to the future and are more powerful than answers in that they demand engagement. Engagement in the right questions is what creates ... | Peter Block

Questions Can Limit or Open Up Thinking David Gurteen - The questions asked in a conversation often determine its direction. Too often, questions aim for quick answers or agreement. The most valuable questions open space for deeper exploration, multiple perspectives, and creative responses. | David Gurteen

Reality Is the Leading Cause of Stress Lily Tomlin - Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. | Lily Tomlin

Reason Is, and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions David Hume (1739) - Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. | David Hume

Relationship and Connectedness Are the Pre-condition for Change Peter Block - Relationship and connectedness are the pre-condition for change. Every meeting, every process, every training program has to get people connected first. Otherwise, the content falls on deaf ears. So small groups are an essential building block to any future you want to create. | Peter Block

Relationships Are All There Is Meg Wheatley - Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. | Meg Wheatley

Reports Aren’t Knowledge Peter Senge - Reports aren’t knowledge. | Peter Senge

Responsibility Begins with the Willingness to Take the Stand That One Is Cause in the Matter of One’s Life Werner Erhard - Responsibility begins with the willingness to take the stand that one is cause in the matter of one’s life. It is a declaration not an assertion, that is, it is a context from which one chooses to live. Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no evaluation of good or bad, right or ... | Werner Erhard

Risk of Independent Thought Christopher Hitchens - Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way. | Christopher Hitchens

Saving Rotterdam From Destruction Arie de Geus (1999) - Imagine that it is 1920 and you have somehow been granted absolute power to predict the future. You happen to visit the mayor of Rotterdam and, during that time, you describe in vivid detail what is going to happen to his town over the next 25 years. Thus, in an otherwise perfectly normal working day, the mayor hears about the advent of the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation, the 1929 stock exchange crash, the Great Depression that…

Science as Falsification Karl Popper - 1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory–if we look for confirmations. 2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory–an event which would have refuted the theory. 3. Every ‘good’ scientific ... | Karl Popper

Science Curiosity Is a Desire to Seek Out and Consume Scientific Information Dan Kahan - Science curiosity is a desire to seek out and consume scientific information just for the pleasure of doing so. People who are science-curious do this because they take satisfaction in seeing what science does to resolve mysteries. That is different from somebody who would show interest in scientific information because they had a specific goal like wanting to do well in school. Science-curious ... | Dan Kahan

Science Is a Profound Source of Spirituality Carl Sagan - Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. | Carl Sagan

Science Literacy Magnifies Political Polarization on Policy-relevant Science Dan Kahan - It has been assumed (very reasonably) for many years that enlightened self-government demands a science-literate citizenry. Perversely, however, recent research has shown that all manner of reasoning proficiency - from cognitive reflection to numeracy, from actively open-minded thinking to science literacy - magnifies political polarization on ... | Dan Kahan

Scientific Attitudes Are Not Based on Rational Evaluation of Evidence Steven Sloman - Scientific attitudes are not based on rational evaluation of evidence, and therefore providing information does not change them. Attitudes are determined instead by a host of contextual and cultural factors that make them largely immune to change. | Steven Sloman

Scratching the Surface of Your Beliefs Jordan Peterson (2023) - It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs. | Jordan Peterson

Scribbled Sentences Are Often Better Ones Than Those Written Deliberately Charles Darwin - There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form. Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words; and then correct deliberately. Sentences thus ...…

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood Stephen R. Covey - If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. | Stephen R. Covey

Self-deception Richard Feynman - You are the easiest person to fool. | Richard Feynman

Sensing Our World Verna Allee - We are in a constant, collective journey of storytelling, sense making, and creation. Knowledge is a conversation. It is not a static “thing,” but a continual process in motion, emerging in the shared communal learning space that arises between people. Every conversation reshapes our knowledge, modifying it to fit new circumstances, expanding it with new information or connections, pruning out ideas and expressions that are no longer useful. Credit: Verna Allee

Setting the Compass Today What conversation could you have differently today? - What conversation could you have differently today? If you were to change just something small about what you say or how you say it, who you listen to and how deeply, what would it be? If you could change someone else’s life for the better, just a little bit, by saying or listening to something differently, what would it be? We’re not asking you ... | Megan Reitz and John Higgins

Shared Meaning Is Achieved Through Real Conversation David Gurteen - Shared meaning does not mean that people agree but that they understand each other’s perspectives well enough to accept them. There is only one way of achieving this, and that's through real conversation. | David Gurteen

Sharing Knowledge Is Not the Same as Information Sharing Peter Senge - Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes. | Peter Senge

Show Me a Professor of Education Who Lectures Donald Clarke - Show me a Professor of Education who lectures, and I’ll show you a hypocrite who doesn’t read the research. | Donald Clarke

Shut Up in Schools Ralph Waldo Emerson - We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. | Ralph Waldo Emerson

Simple Conversations Give Birth to Actions Meg Wheatley - Nothing has given me more hope recently than to observe how simple conversations give birth to actions that can change lives and restore our faith in the future. There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation. When a group of people discover that they share a common concern, that's when the process of change begins. | Meg Wheatley

Small Talk, Big Talk David Gurteen - Small Talk – polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters. Big talk – deep, meaningful conversation that helps you get to know other people better. | David Gurteen

So Convenient a Thing to Be a Reasonable Creature Benjamin Franklin - So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do. | Benjamin Franklin

Solving Problems and Consciousness Albert Einstein (paraphrase of original text) - No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. | Albert Einstein

Sonder The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll ... | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Spirituality Means Waking Up Anthony de Mello - Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. | Anthony de Mello

Stop Making Lists of Idealised Qualities of How Things Should Be Dave Snowden - If you want to make any real difference then stop making lists of idealised qualities of how things should be — they will always end up as anodyne platitudes — focus on understanding and critically ACTING in the present to start shifting things in a better direction | Dave Snowden

Systems Leadership Is How You Lead When You’re Not in Charge Debbie Sorkin - Systems Leadership is about how you lead across boundaries – departmental, organisational or sector. It’s how you lead when you’re not in charge, and you need to influence others rather than pull a management lever. It describes the way you need to work when you face large, complex, difficult and seemingly intractable problems; where you need to juggle multiple uncertainties; where no one person ... | Debbie Sorkin

Take Responsibility for Your Thoughts, Feelings, Words, and Actions Dina Marais - Take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions. To take responsibility for your life is to take responsibility for your powers of thinking, feeling, speaking and acting, because this is the structure of all human experience. You create your life with your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions. You take responsibility when you ... | Dina Marais

Talk to Someone About Themselves and They’ll Listen for Hours Dale Carnegie - Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours. | Dale Carnegie

Teaching Critical Thinking Richard Dawkins - Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you. | Richard Dawkins

Teaching Critical Thinking Alone Is Not a Solution to Helping People Question Their Beliefs David Gurteen - Teaching critical thinking alone is not a solution to helping people question their beliefs, it simply helps them to better post rationalize their beliefs. Credit: David Gurteen

Technologies Are Not Mere Exterior Aids Walter Ong - Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word. | Walter Ong

Technology Does Not Automatically Improve Conversation Theodore Zeldin - Technology does not automatically improve conversation, communication or behaviour. | Theodore Zeldin

The Advance of Civilization Is Dependent Upon the Opportunity for Accidents to Happen Friedrich Hayek - Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen. | Friedrich Hayek

The After-action Review Is Arguably One of the Most Successful Organizational Learning Methods Peter Senge - The Army's After Action Review (AAR) is arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised. Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practice into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique. | Peter Senge

The Attention of One Human Being to Another Is an Act of Creation Nancy Kline - The attention of one human being to another is an act of creation. | Nancy Kline

The Best Argument Against Democracy Misattributed to Winston Churchill - The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. | Winston Churchill

The Best Way to Gauge the Quality of Someone’s Ideas Adam Grant (2024) - The best way to gauge the quality of someone’s ideas isn’t to listen to them talking. It’s to read their writing. Compelling speakers can mask weak logic with strong charisma. Putting key points on a page exposes flawed reasoning. Compelling writing requires clear thinking. | Adam Grant

The Book Medium Is a Stronger Message Than Its Content Marshall McLuhan - When I was teaching at Columbia University, techno-prophet Marshall McLuhan came down from Toronto to lecture there. He talked about how the linear pattern of information resulting from print technology limited the thought patterns of people who learned from printed books. Word follows word, line follows line, paragraph follows paragraph, page follows page, chapter follows chapter, in a single ... | Mel Alexenberg

The Cause of Unhappiness Anthony de Mello - There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. | Anthony de Mello

The Challenge of Open Dialogue in an Age of Technological Division Sam Harris (2025) - I think we need a truly open-ended conversation with 8 billion strangers, and what makes that hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies. | Sam Harris

The Consequence of Lies Hannah Arendt - If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. ... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do ... | Hannah Arendt

The Conversation of Mankind Michael Oakeshott - In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a ... | Michael Oakeshott

The Definition of Love Scott Peck - I define love thus: "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." | Scott Peck

The Difference Between Management and Leadership Steve Jobs - Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could. | Steve Jobs

The Digitalisation of Everything Is Leading to a Hyperconnected World Tango Matsumoto - A radically different future is coming, where the digitalisation of everything leads to a hyperconnected world. | Tango Matsumoto

The Easiest Success Measurement Tool Is a Simple Question Rich DiGirolamo - The easiest success measurement tool is a simple question. What did you do today to move forward? The easiest project plan on earth is also a simple question. What will you do tomorrow to move forward? At the end of each day, document your success and design your next move. | Rich DiGirolamo

The Entangled Age Danny Hillis (2016) - We can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world or our technology, but as a part of them, integrated, codependent, and entangled. Credit: Danny Hillis

The Essence of Synergy Is to Value Differences Stephen Covey - The essence of synergy is to value differences – to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for weaknesses. | Stephen Covey

The Four Stumbling Blocks to Truth Roger Bacon - There are, in fact, four very significant stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a ... | Roger Bacon

The Function of an Academic Piece of Writing Larry McEnerney - The function of an academic piece is not to communicate your ideas, it's to change the ideas of an existing community. Now, sometimes you do that by communicating your ideas, sometimes you don't. But understand what it's for and understand that your training has been all about revealing your head. | Larry McEnerney

The Function of Your Writing Is to Move a Conversation Forward Larry McEnerney - The function of your writing is to move a conversation forward. | Larry McEnerney

The Fundamental Cause of Trouble in the World Bertrand Russell - The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. | Bertrand Russell

The Future Cannot Be Predicted, but Futures Can Be Invented Dennis Gabor - The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. | Dennis Gabor

The Future Will Be Different Peter Drucker - The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. | Peter Drucker

The Global Information Ecosystem David Gurteen - The Global Information Ecosystem likens the enormous, linked digital world of data and information to an ecological system. This metaphor highlights that our shared digital commons is a valuable asset requiring protection from harm, just as natural environments do. | David Gurteen

The Great Gift of Conversation Jean de La Bruyère - The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you. | Jean de La Bruyère

The Greater the Ignorance, the Greater the Dogmatism William Osler - The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism. | William Osler

The Greatest Scientific Discovery Was the Discovery of Ignorance Yuval Noah Harari - The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress. | Yuval Noah Harari

The Importance of Respect in Society Gail Pursell Elliott - As a society, we have come to a point where people too often treat one another as objects and opportunities, rather than as fellow human beings. Respecting one another as individuals, or not doing so, seriously impacts the future ­ for all of us. | Gail Pursell Elliott

The Indirect Path to Happiness John Stuart Mill - I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or…

The Inexpressible Comfort of Feeling Safe with a Person Dinah Craik - Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. | Dinah Craik

The Intelligence Trap Gurwinder Bhogal - Unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. | Gurwinder Bhogal

The Intent Is Pelagian. the Architecture Is Augustinian. Dave Snowden - The intent is Pelagian. The architecture is Augustinian. | Dave Snowden

The Kind of Conversation I Like David Gurteen - The kind of conversation I like is one where everyone is prepared to speak up and does not feel the need to censor anything they say. | David Gurteen

The Kind of Conversation I Like Theodore Zeldin - The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person. | Theodore Zeldin

The Last of Human Freedoms Viktor Frankl - The last of human freedoms — the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances. | Viktor Frankl

The Leader’s New Work Peter Senge - Our traditional view of leaders — as special people who set the direction, make the key decisions, and energize the troops — is deeply rooted in an individualistic and non-systemic world-view. In a learning organization, the leaders' role differs dramatically from that of the charismatic decision maker. Leaders are designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to ... | Peter Senge

The Liberal Democracy Is an Artificial Environment Tim Urban - The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an ... | Tim Urban

The Line Between Good and Evil Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1958 - 1968) - The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains... an un-uprooted small ... | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Meaning of Spirituality David Gurteen - Spirituality means a deep appreciation, respect, and love for the universe, the world, all life, and humanity — a sense of connectedness, awe, wonder, and curiosity — a deep understanding of being human and alive. | David Gurteen

The Metaphor Is Perhaps One of Man’s Most Fruitful Potentialities José Ortega y Gasse - The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. | José Ortega y Gasse

The Mind Is Not a Vessel to Be Filled but a Fire to Be Kindled Plutarch - The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. | Plutarch

The Most Fruitful and Natural Play of the Mind Is in Conversation Michel de Montaigne - In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice. | Michel de Montaigne

The Most Radical Thing We Can Do Is Connect People to One Another Rosabeth Moss Kanter - The most radical thing we can do is connect people to one another. That starts conversations toward a vision for change. | Rosabeth Moss Kanter

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence Erik J. Larson (2021) - The myth is not that true AI is possible. As to that, the future of AI is a scientific unknown. The myth of artificial intelligence is that its arrival is inevitable, and only a matter of time-that we have already embarked on the path that will lead to human-level AI, and then superintelligence. We have not. | Erik J. Larson

The Only Real Way to Disarm Your Enemy Is to Listen to Them Amaryllis Fox - The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. | Amaryllis Fox

The Paradox of Tolerance Karl Popper - Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant ... | Karl Popper

The Politics of Our Society Are a Conversation Michael Oakeshott - The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free. | Michael Oakeshott

The Potential of Strategic Conversation David Gurteen - A strategic conversation has the potential to influence the future direction of an individual, an organization, a community, a society, or the world. | David Gurteen

The Power in All Relationships Lies with Whoever Cares Less Connor Mead in the film Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) - Someone once told me that the power in all relationships lies with whoever cares less, and he was right. But power isn't happiness, and I think that maybe happiness comes from caring more about people rather than less ... Credit: Connor Mead in the film Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

The Power of Skepticism Carl Sagan - Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallability. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan — political or religious — who comes ambling along. Credit: Carl Sagan

The Problem Is Not People Being Uneducated Richard Feynman - The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught. | Richard Feynman

The Process of Writing Georg Buehler - The process of writing can be a powerful tool for self-discovery. Writing demands self-knowledge; it forces the writer to become a student of human nature, to pay attention to his experience, to understand the nature of experience itself. By delving into raw experience and distilling it into a work of art, the writer is engaging in the heart and soul of philosophy - making sense out of life. | Georg Buehler

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence Brian Cantwell Smith (2019) - Neither deep learning nor other forms of second-wave AI, nor any proposals yet advanced for third-wave, will lead to genuine intelligence. Credit: Brian Cantwell Smith

The Question Is, What Qualifies as Action? Peter Block - The question is, what qualifies as action? Traditionally , we want a strategy, and a list of next steps and milestones , and the knowledge of who will be responsible for them in order to be satisfied that we have spent our time well when we are together. Any change in the world will, in fact, need this kind of action. To say, however, that this is ... | Peter Block 

The Real Task of Leadership Is to Confront People with Their Freedom Peter Block - The search for human freedom—freedom being the choice to be a creator of our own experience and accept the unbearable responsibility that goes with that. Out of this insight grows the idea that perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom. This may be the ultimate act of love that is called for from those who hold power over others. | Peter Block

The Rise of Technical Civilizations Carl Sagan - The assumption that technical civilizations must necessarily make an appearance, even after many billions of years of biological evolution, implies that the ultimate purpose, or goal, in the formation of stars and planets is the production of intelligent beings and technical civilizations — an idealistic and teleological view. | Carl Sagan

The Role of Trust in Sensemaking David Gurteen - To reduce uncertainty and foster effective sense-making and decision-making, it all boils down to trust — we must have unwavering faith in the things we read, the videos we watch, and the people with whom we communicate. | David Gurteen

The Sciences of Complexity Change Our Perspective and Thinking Esko Kilpi - The sciences of complexity change our perspective and thinking. Perhaps, as a result we should, especially in management, focus more attention on what we are doing than what we should be doing. Following the thinking presented by the most advanced scientific researchers, the important question to answer is not what should happen in the future, but ... | Esko Kilpi

The Secret of Life Is to Have a Task Henry Moore - The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do. | Henry Moore

The Secret to Successful Knowledge Management David Gurteen - The secret to successful Knowledge Management is simple: link it to what keeps the CEO awake at night. | David Gurteen

The Separation of the Learned From the Conversible World David Hume (1742) - The Separation of the Learned from the conversible World seems to have been the great Defect of the last Age, and must have had a very bad Influence both on Books and Company: For what Possibility is there of finding Topics of Conversation fit for the Entertainment of rational Creatures, without having Recourse sometimes to History, Poetry, Politics, and the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy? Must our whole Discourse be a continued Series…

The Single Biggest Problem in Communication George Bernard Shaw - The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. | George Bernard Shaw

The Story of the Chinese Farmer Alan Watts - Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, "We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate." The farmer said, "Maybe." The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came ... | Alan Watts

The Story of the Eagle Who Grew Up as a Chicken Anthony de Mello - A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and…

The True Leader in a Group Is Rarely the Person Who Talks the Most Adam Grant - The true leader in a group is rarely the person who talks the most. It’s usually the person who listens best. Listening is more than hearing what's said. It’s noticing and surfacing what isn't said. Inviting dissenting views and amplifying quiet voices are acts of leadership. | Adam Grant

The Workplace Is an Investment in Communication Ben Waber - If space can improve how we communicate, that is fundamentally what improves performance and what makes the company money. The workplace is really not about cost. It’s an investment in communication. | Ben Waber

The World Doesn’t Change One Person at a Time Meg Wheatley - Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what's possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical ... | Meg Wheatley

The World Is a Thing of Utter Inordinate Complexity and Richness Douglas Adams - The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it’s just wonderful. And the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 ... | Douglas Adams

The World Needs Is People Who Have Come Alive Howard Thurman - Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. | Howard Thurman

There Ain’t Them So Blind as Them That Won’t Listen Delboy's Old Mum - There ain't them so blind as them that won't listen. Credit: Delboy's Old Mum Only Fools and Horses http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/onlyfools

There Are a Thousand Hacking at the Branches of Evil Henry David Thoreau (1854) - There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. | Henry David Thoreau

There Are No Problems in Complex Systems David Gurteen - The idea of a “problem” in a complex or complex adaptive system is misleading, as it suggests the existence of a clear, identifiable issue that can be resolved independently. In reality, what we perceive as problems are often symptoms of deeper, systemic patterns and interactions. | David Gurteen

There Are No Solutions Only Responses in Complex Adaptive Systems David Gurteen - In a complex or complex adaptive system, the notion of "problem-solving" is an illusion. Instead of definitive solutions, there is only an endless series of adaptive responses. | David Gurteen

There Are No Sources of Information We Can Totally Trust David Gurteen - There are no sources of information we can totally trust. We must conduct due diligence through thorough research and analysis. To make sound decisions and meaningful actions, we must avoid shortcuts and laziness, putting in the necessary effort. | David Gurteen

There Is Beauty in Truth, Even If It’s Painful José Harris - There is beauty in truth, even if it’s painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don’t teach anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one’s character, one’s mind, one’s heart or one’s soul. | José N. Harris

There Is No Capacity for Effective Action in a Database Peter Senge - Knowledge is the capacity for effective action. There is no capacity for effective action in a database. | Peter Senge

There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home Ken Olsen - There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. | Ken Olsen

There Is Only One Cause of Unhappiness Anthony de Mello - There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. | Anthony de Mello

There’s More to Morality Than Harm and Fairness Jonathan Haidt (2012) - There's more to morality than harm and fairness. | Jonathan Haidt

There’s No Difference Between Writing and Thinking Jordan B Peterson - The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write because there's no difference between that and thinking. Credit: Jordan B Peterson

There’s No Such Thing as Knowledge Management Peter Drucker - There’s no such thing as knowledge management; there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. | Peter Drucker

Think of All the Beauty Anne Frank - Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. | Anne Frank

Thinking and Spoken Discourse Plato - Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound. | Plato

Thinking Differently David Bohm - The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained. | David Bohm

Thinking Is Dangerous Hannah Arendt - There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. | Hannah Arendt

To Be a Catalyst Theodore Zeldin - To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction. | Theodore Zeldin

To Really Work Conversationally Johnnie Moore, 2023 - To really work conversationally, I think, is potentially to be really open to the complexity of what being human is like. | Johnnie Moore

To See a World in a Grain of Sand William Blake - To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour | William Blake

To Yearn for the Endless Immensity of the Sea Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to yearn for the endless immensity of the sea. | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Touching Distance for a Good Conversation David Gurteen - You need to be in touching distance of another person to have a really good conversation. | David Gurteen

Transformation Is About a Shift in Language and Conversation Peter Block - We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing. We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or ... | Peter Block 

Treating Governance Like Scientific Experimentation Steven Pinker - Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition. | Steven Pinker

True Eureka Innovation Is Only Going to Happen by Engagement in the Real World Dave Snowden - True Eureka innovation is not going to happen by an internal training programme but from engagement in the real world. | Dave Snowden

True Values Are Not Taught and Declared Dave Snowden - True values are not taught and declared, they evolve through the acts and interaction of the living, they are understood at a near tacit level by those who live them. | Dave Snowden 

Trust Is an Essential Ingredient of Belief Formation Matthew Syed - Perhaps the clinching point is that trust is an essential ingredient of belief formation. Why? Because we don’t have the time to check the evidence for everything, so we have to take some things at face value. We trust doctors, chemists, and teachers. Even experts trust other experts, taking their data and outputs as inputs for their own ... | Matthew Syed

Trust Is the Bandwidth of Communication Karl-Erik Sveiby - Trust is the bandwidth of communication. | Karl-Erik Sveiby

Trust Is the Life-blood of an Organization Stephen R. Covey - Trust is the life-blood of an organization. | Stephen R. Covey

Trying to Predict the Future Peter Drucker - Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. | Peter Drucker

Understanding Life Less and Less Jules Renard - As I grow to understand life less and less I grow to love it more and more. | Jules Renard

Understanding Ourselves Bernard Mandeville (1714) - One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves, is, that most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are. Credit: Bernard Mandeville

Until One Is Committed, There Is Hesitancy W. H. Murray - But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money – booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and ... | W. H. Murray

Using Talk to Reason Together Neil Mercer - Our research shows that when students learn how to use talk to reason together, they become better at reasoning on their own. | Neil Mercer

Watashiato The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - watashiato n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see. | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

We All Need Care Lynn Berger - We all need care. Without it, children wouldn’t make it to adulthood, patients wouldn’t recover, and communities wouldn’t grow or thrive. And “care” doesn’t just extend to people, either: if we fail to take care of our possessions, our buildings, and our infrastructure, then our landfills will overflow and our cities will crumble. If we don’t care ... | Lynn Berger

We Always Know More Than We Can Say Dave Snowden - We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. | Dave Snowden

We Are All in the Same Cart, Going to Execution Thomas More - We are all in the same cart, going to execution; how can I hate anyone or wish anyone harm? | Thomas More

We Are Drowning in Information, While Starving for Wisdom E. O. Wilson - We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. | E. O. Wilson

We Are in the Grip of an Astonishing Delusion John Holt - We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a ... | John Holt

We Are Living Through One of the Most Fundamental Shifts in History Willis Harman - We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history- a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world. | Willis Harman

We Are Moving Into a New Period of Human Consciousness Henry Kissinger - We are moving into a new period of human consciousness which we don’t yet fully understand. When we say a new period of human consciousness, we mean that the perception of the world will be different, at least as different as between the age of enlightenment and the medieval period, when the Western world moved from a religious perception of the ... | Henry Kissinger

We Are Not Enemies, but Friends Abraham Lincoln - We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as ... | Abraham Lincoln

We Are So Steeped in Debate Theodore Zeldin - Unfortunately we are so steeped in debate, proving one's point and challenging others, that alternative possibilities for interaction are often eclipsed from our view. It is interesting to notice that even when we say we want to dialogue we commonly end up in debate. We appear to have a longing to do something different but the vortex of habit ... | Theodore Zeldin

We Are Walking on a Trampoline Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin - Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and “solutions” often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on. | The Power of Positive Deviance

We Don’t Have a Good Word for Engaging in a Non-hostile Disagreement Ian Leslie - We don’t have a good word for engaging in a non-hostile disagreement with the shared aim of moving the participants towards a new understanding, better decision or new idea. Debate implies a competition with winners and losers. Argument comes tinged with animosity. Dialogue is too bland. Dialectic is too obscure. We talk about argument as if it is ... | Ian Leslie

We Get to Knowledge by Having Desires and Curiosity David Weinberger - We get to knowledge — especially "actionable" knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes ... | David Weinberger

We Had Talk Enough, but No Conversation Samuel Johnson - We had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed. | Samuel Johnson

We Have Not Touched the Deeper Causes of Our Troubles David Bohm - For both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever-growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly, we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. It is the main point of this book that the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our ... | David Bohm

We Have to Be More Than We Are Jordan B Peterson - We have to be more than we are because if we aren’t, we’re not going to survive. | Jordan B Peterson

We Just Need Everyone Engaged Eileen Fisher - We all have to lead at different times, we all have to contribute and find our voices and find what’s meaningful. I think this world is in trouble in a lot of ways and we need smart people everywhere … we just need everyone engaged. | Eileen Fisher

We Make a Living by What We Get, but We Make a Life by What We Give Falsely attributed to Winston Churchill - We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. | Winston Churchill

We Need to Cultivate a Universal Responsibility for One Another and the Planet We Share Dalai Lama - I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to cultivate a universal responsibility for one another and the planet we share. | Dalai Lama

We Need to Start Talking and Listening Jordan Peterson - And so we need to start talking and listening. And when you talk it doesn’t mean you’re right. It doesn’t mean you’re correct. Right? It means you’re trying to articulate and formulate your thoughts like the boneheaded moron that you are. And you are going to stumble around idiotically because what the hell do you know. You are full of biases, and ... | Jordan Peterson

We Own Collective Responsibility for Global Conditions Ronald Heifetz - We own collective responsibility for the global conditions that we impact and that impact us. We will not make these changes based on authority-based leadership, but rather with each of us taking a leadership role. | Ronald Heifetz

We’re Crazy Anthony de Mello - We're crazy, We're living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything. | Anthony de Mello

We’re Social Creatures Dalai Lama - We’re social creatures, we depend on each other, which is why we need a sense of concern for others’ well-being. Compassion is what’s important and you don’t have to be religious to practise it. Practising compassion here and now—living a meaningful life—is what is most important. | Dalai Lama

Webs of Human Conversations Fernando Flores - An organsation's results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversations. | Fernando Flores

What Is a Community? David Gurteen (2022) - A community results from a web of complex and interdependent relationships that form over time among individuals who share common interests, values, and aspirations. Community members care deeply about one another and work closely together towards a common purpose. | David Gurteen

What Is a Conversation Covenant? David Gurteen and David Creelman - A conversation covenant is an agreement between two or more persons to abide by a set of rules when engaging in conversation. The rules are intended to help people work in harmony to create a psychologically safer space for difficult or seemingly impossible conversations. | David Gurteen and David Creelman

What Is a Knowledge Worker? Peter Drucker (1959) - Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an "executive" if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results. | Peter Drucker

What Is a Knowledge Worker? David Gurteen David Gurteen (2006) - Knowledge workers are those people who have taken responsibility for their work lives. They continually strive to understand the world about them and modify their work practices and behaviors to better meet their personal and organizational objectives. No one tells them what to do. They do not take No for an answer. They are self motivated. | David Gurteen

What Is a Knowledge Worker? David Weinberger David Weinberger (2000) - Here's a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, 'knowledge worker'. A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work. The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested ... | David Weinberger

What Is a Knowledge Worker? Tom Stewart Tom Stewart - A Knowledge Worker is someone who gets to decide what he or she does each morning. Credit: Tom Stewart

What Is a Positive Relationship? David Gurteen - A positive relationship is one in which two people listen, communicate clearly without judgment, respect, and trust each other, as well as support, encourage, and help each other on a practical and emotional level. | David Gurteen

What Is a Powerful Question? David Gurteen - A powerful question provokes us to think deeply and to engage intensely in conversation with others which leads to a deeper or broader understanding of a subject and new insights. It potentially changes the direction in which we are moving. | David Gurteen

What Is a Relationship? Edgar Schein and Peter Schein - A relationship is a set of mutual expectations about each other’s future behavior based on past interactions with one another. We have a relationship when we can anticipate each other’s behavior to some degree. When we say we have a 'good relationship', this means that we feel a certain level of comfort with the other person, comfort that is based ... | Edgar Schein and Peter Schein

What Is an Oracy Lab? David Gurteen - The Oracy Lab is an experimental space for exploring the power and possibilities of spoken communication for conveying meaning and co-creating a deeper understanding of the complexity and dynamics of the world. | David Gurteen

What Is Communityship? David Gurteen - Communityship is a practice where community members take responsibility for that community's growth and development. They nurture positive relationships between themselves and other members of the community. Furthermore, they help develop positive relationships between other members. | David Gurteen

What Is Complex Leadership? Ted Cadsby - What is complex leadership? It starts by understanding the strengths and vulnerabilities of group dialogue. It uses this knowledge to leverage cognitive diversity within a group. | Ted Cadsby

What Is Conversational Leadership? David Gurteen - Conversational Leadership is about how we respond to the complexity of the world we’re living in. It’s about taking responsibility for the changes we want to see, and recognising that none of us can do that alone. By practising leadership through dialogue, we bring in different perspectives, we listen, we question, and we learn and think together. In this way, dialogue becomes the means by which ... | David Gurteen

What Is Intelligence? Wikipedia - Intelligence can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. | Wikipedia

What Is Oracy? David Gurteen - Oracy is the ability to speak persuasively, articulate thoughts and ideas clearly, listen powerfully to others, clarify our own ideas and understanding, influence each other through conversation, and express our views with confidence and humility. | David Gurteen

What Is Organizational Culture? Dave Snowden - Organizational culture is the attitudes, customs, rituals, values and beliefs shared by the members of an organization that govern their behavior. Organizational culture is emergent. It is the result of the everyday interactions, behaviors, and conversations by the members of an organization. Culture is the way that we do things around here that ... | Dave Snowden

What Is Politics? The actions or activities of a person or group to influence decision-making - In its broadest sense, politics is the actions or activities of a person or group to influence or control decisions and the outcomes of those decisions within a specific group context, e.g., a country, community, or organization. These actions or activities include gaining power or helping others achieve power and consequently influencing or controlling the decisions and outcomes. | David Gurteen

What Is Rhetoric? David Gurteen - Rhetoric is about far more than influencing people through speech. It is how we communicate effectively in our daily lives and, in addition to speech, can take the form of text, images, videos, or any other form of media. | David Gurteen

What Is Street Epistemology? Anthony Magnabosco - Street Epistemology is a conversational tool that helps people reflect on the quality of their reasons and the reliability of their methods used to derive their confidence level in their deeply-held beliefs. | Anthony Magnabosco

What Is the Root Cause of the Major Problems in the World? Gregory Bateson - The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. | Gregory Bateson

What Men Really Want Is Not Knowledge but Certainty Bertrand Russell - What men really want is not knowledge but certainty. | Bertrand Russell

What Needs to Be Done, Emerges From Conversation Dave Pollard - Whether you want to change the political or economic system, save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or anything else, the answer is in how meaning, and understanding of what needs to be done, emerges from conversation in community with people you love, people who care. | Dave Pollard

When Dealing with People, We Are Not Dealing with Creatures of Logic Dale Carnegie - When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. | Dale Carnegie

When Minds Meet Theodore Zeldin - Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, and engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards. | Theodore Zeldin

When People Talk Listen Completely Ernest Hemingway - When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. | Ernest Hemingway

Where Does Progress Come From in the World? George Gilder - The United States did not enter the microcosm through the portals of the Ivy League, with Brooks Brothers suits, gentleman Cs, and warbling society wives. Few people who think they are already in can summon the energies to break in. From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, ... | George Gilder

Where There Is Love There Are No Demands Anthony de Mello - Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, But I do not cling. | Anthony de Mello

Whim or Sentiment or Chance John Maynard Keynes - We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical ... | John Maynard Keynes

Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do Erik J. Larson (2021) - Success on narrow applications get us not one step closer to general intelligence. The inferences that systems require for general intelligence ... cannot be programmed, learned, or engineered with our current knowledge of AI. ... No algorithm exists for general intelligence. | Erik J. Larson

Why Do We Trust People? Seth Godin - We trust people because they showed up when it wasn’t convenient, because they told the truth when it was easier to lie and because they kept a promise when they could have gotten away with breaking it. | Seth Godin

Why Human Skills Still Count in the Age of AI Jamie Dimon - My advice to people would be critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ [emotional quotient], learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write. You'll have plenty of jobs. | Jamie Dimon

Why Is So Little Importance Attached to Oracy? David Gurteen - In education, considerable emphasis is placed on numeracy and literacy—the ability to understand and work with numbers and the ability to read and write. But what about the capacity to listen and to speak? Why is so little importance attached to oracy? | David Gurteen

Why the Humanities Still Matter Daniela Amodei - A lot of these [LLM] models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human—understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important. | Daniela Amodei

Without Dialogue Megan Reitz - Without dialogue, we extinguish ideas, we cover up wrongdoing, the quality of our decision-making deteriorates and our engagement plummets. | Megan Reitz

Writing as Thinking George Orwell - If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them. | George Orwell

Writing, Thinking, Conversing—a Cycle of Insight David Gurteen - I write to think, think to write, and converse to do both. | David Gurteen

Written Words Are Residue Walter Ong - Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit … Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person, asked to think of the word 'nevertheless', will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word ... | Walter Ong

You Are Not Here Merely to Make a Living Woodrow Wilson - You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. | Woodrow Wilson

You Can’t Build Community Nora Bateson - You can't make someone love you. You can't force respect. You can't mandate care. And you can't build community. Please be careful with talk of building community. Community is a consequence of many contextual relationships intertwining over time, more like a meadow than legos. | Nora Bateson

You Have a Moral Obligation to Do Remarkable Things Jordan B Peterson - You have a moral obligation to do remarkable things with this miracle of existence that has been granted to you. | Jordan Peterson

You Have to Use Writing to Help Yourself Do Your Thinking Larry McEnerney - Unlike a journalist, almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think. In other words, the thinking that you're doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking. | Larry McEnerney

Your Art Is the Act of Taking Personal Responsibility Seth Godin - Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. | Seth Godin

Your Beliefs Become Your Thoughts Mahatma Gandhi - Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny. | Mahatma Gandhi