Edward de Bono Quotes

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

We will have to decide today whether we will design the future or resign ourselves to it.

I'm pretty good at thinking about everything - all of my consequences - before I make a decision, and I think about everything that's going to happen because of that decision. I'm a Libra, and I'm very strategic.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

You politicians have got to look further ahead; you always got a Putter in your hands, when you ought to have a Driver.

An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.

It is better to take time to consider before than to find time to repent after.

Thoughtful people are concerned with the future because that is the only area of experience about which anything can be done. We cannot change the past, and the present is gone as soon as it is reported, but the future is that in which we can make a difference.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

We're really at this point where we can take a step back and think about the next big things that we want to do.

I want to make smart choices.

I don't really do without any plans. If somebody is trying to do something, you must have plans.

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.

Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

Only you can control your future.

We can do things the cheap way, the simple way, for the short-term and without regard for the future. Or, we can make the extra effort, do the hard work, absorb the criticism and make decisions that will cause a better future.

Neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future.

A nation has to look ahead.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

Take hold of your future or the future will take hold of you

I decide my future. I decide what I want to do. Nobody else. If I decide this will be my last year, maybe it is. If I decide it will be my last contract, I decide that. Nobody else. So I will decide when the moment is there.

I think long-term, not short-term.

The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them, they have a vision of the future.

It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values.

You have to make smart decisions, but you never know what will happen in the future.