Edward de Bono Quotes

I'm always open to the possibility that somebody's got a better idea than I have. It happens with some frequency.

I'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

If an expert says it can't be done, get another expert.

I like to have fulsome discussions on every topic. What happens if you lose this show? What would you do? We have to look at every hypothesis.

I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's cheesy' or 'What do you think of this?'

I have some ideas on how to fix that. They're not very good ideas, but at least they're ideas!

Experimentation is an active science.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

We can't get any new thinking because we can't get any new thinkers.

I try to be a positive person, but I'm also always looking and wondering, 'Maybe this could be done differently.' As soon as your mind is in a critical mode, you're halfway through designing; as soon as you start thinking about whether something could be better, you're already halfway through a solution.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

Often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, "But of course, this is what it is" and got an important result.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.

Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.

Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe. Without possibilities you cannot make progress.

Improvements are invented only by those who can feel that something is not good.

Imagination plus innovation equals realization.

To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.

[My father] advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that he did.