Visionary Thinkers Quotes

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge. It is in the darker. It is in the darker regions of science that great men are recognized; they are marked by ideas which light up phenomena hitherto obscure and carry science forward.

There are two types of people in this world: those whose look for opportunity and those who make it happen.

I think very often the boat-rockers turn out to be the people who are building the craft

I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.

Thinkers, makers and traders are the DNA of the world class company

People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.

It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.

Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.

Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

At any one time the world has a very limited number of Steve Jobs or Winston Churchills or Thomas Watson the firsts. These are wonderful people and we can learn much from them, but praying for a few more of them to solve the world's problems is not a great idea.

All progress comes from the creative minority.

The great and rare mystics of the past . . . were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.

Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

A society without its dreamers can never be free.