Human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. … It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.

Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.

What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.

Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.

Somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some [education] policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.