Antony Jay Quotes

The best creative solutions don't come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented... They come from inventing new questions!

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

Posing good questions is harder than it might seem... It's hard because asking good questions requires you to see past the easy answers and to focus instead on the difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes the painful. ... Great leaders don't have all the answers, but they know how to ask the right questions - questions that force others and themselves to move past old and tired answers, questions that open up possibilities that, before the question, went unseen.

The critical mind is the creative mind.

I've always challenged myself and the people who work with me to take new approaches to traditional business challenges, to push the envelope and constantly ask whether our sacred cows are still producing great milk.

If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.

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

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.

The fact is that creativity is everywhere. It's just about the way that you look at things.

Most people believe that great leaders are distinguished by their ability to give compelling answers. This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions…. Berger poses many fascinating questions, including this one: What if companies had mission questions rather than mission statements? This is a book everyone ought to read—without question.

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

In mathematics, the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.

Creativity and business acumen don't always go hand in hand.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.