The Renaissance… was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

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.

When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?

Only when people learn to converse will they begin to be equal.

Everything I am going to say to you is the child of a conversation. [...] That is the aspect of conversation that particularly excites me: how conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world.