Ian Leslie > Quotes

“What makes us so adaptable? In one word, culture – our ability learn from others, to copy, imitate, share and improve.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“ignorant but happy’ effect – when people are confident that they have the answers they become blithely incurious about alternatives.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“Ignorance as a deliberate choice, can be used to reinforce prejudice and discrimination.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“The truly curious will be increasingly in demand. Employers are looking for people who can do more than follow procedures competently or respond to requests; who have a strong intrinsic desire to learn, solve problems and ask penetrating questions. They may be difficult to manage at times, these individuals, for their interests and enthusiasms can take them along unpredictable paths, and they don’t respond well to being told what to think. But for the most part, they will be worth the difficulty.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“We know that new ideas often come from the cross-fertilisation of different fields, occurring in the mind of a widely knowledgeable person.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“Whoever you are and whatever start you get in life, knowing stuff makes the world more abundant with possibilities and gleams of light more likely to illuminate the darkness. It opens the universe a little.”
― ian leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“It's only people, as far as we know, who look up at the stars and wonder what they are.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”
― Ian Leslie, Born Liars: Why We Can't Live without Deceit

“... knowing what not to know was itself indispensable knowledge.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care much. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“how does it feel,' wonders the neuroscientist Christof Koch, 'to bhe the mute hemisphere, permanently encased in one skull in the company of a dominant sibling that does all the talking?”
― Ian Leslie, Born Liars: Why We Can't Live without Deceit

“Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 talk on educational reform—entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.”
― Ian Leslie

“A society that values order above all else will seek to suppress curiosity. But a society that believes in progress, innovation and creativity will cultivate it, recognising that the enquiring minds of its people constitute its most valuable asset. In medieval Europe, the enquiring mind – especially if it enquired too closely into the edicts of Church or state – was stigmatised. During the Renaissance and Reformation, received wisdoms began to be interrogated, and by the time of the Enlightenment, European societies started to see that their future lay with the curious, and encouraged probing questions rather than stamping on them. The result was the biggest explosion of new ideas and scientific advances in history. The great unlocking of curiosity translated into a cascade of prosperity for the nations that precipitated it. Today, we cannot know for sure if we are in the middle of this golden period or at the end of it. But we are, at the very least, in a lull. With the important exception of the internet, the innovations that catapulted Western societies ahead of the global pack are thin on the ground, while the rapid growth of Asian and South American economies has not yet been accompanied by a comparable run of indigenous innovation. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, has termed the current period ‘the great stagnation’.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“A policy of deliberate ignorance is often adopted by those who wish to protect their own power.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care much. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is. Stephen Fry”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“There’s a reason for this. Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point, as everyone from Galileo to Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs could have attested.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“social loafing’ – the widespread tendency of individuals to decrease their own effort when they start working collaboratively.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“Society is held together by communication and information. Samuel Johnson”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“[Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”
― Ian Leslie

“They look beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way.”
― Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

“The only person or thing that can make you stupid, or incurious, is you.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“The most fundamental reason to choose curiosity isn’t so that we can do better at school or at work. The true beauty of learning stuff, including apparently useless stuff, is that it takes us out of ourselves, reminds us that we are part of a far greater project, one that has been underway for at least as long as human beings have been talking to each other. Other animals don’t share or store their knowledge like we do.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“During the conversation with Hunter Davies, Cynthia says, “What I would like is a holiday on our own, without the Beatles. Just John, Julian, and me.” Lennon, smiling, says, “You what? Not even with our Beatle buddies?” Cynthia shakes her head. “They seem to need you less than you need them.”
― Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

“What made him exceptional were a ferocious will to succeed and a burning sense of epistemic curiosity. Jobs was interested in everything: the Bauhaus movement, the”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

“For all his formidable self-confidence, he harboured doubts about the person he was at heart, and sometimes questioned whether he had a heart at all. Iris Caldwell, his girlfriend from Liverpool, recalled that her mother had accused him of being emotionally cold. It ate at him: years later, just before the release of 'Yesterday', Paul called Iris and said her mother should listen to Yesterday to see if it changed her mind. In an interview in the 1980s, he brought up the moment when he heard about his mother's death (‘What are we going to do for money?’), and said, ‘I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Really, deep down, I never have quite forgiven myself for that.’ As he danced through a Beatle life in which every door seemed to open the moment he touched it, he retained, in his mind, the baleful image of himself he drew as a teenager: a face that scowled rather than smiled. He once described his public self as 'pleasantly insincere’. He was drawn to those who saw through his masks and loved him nonetheless. Being accepted by John confirmed to him that he was special. Being loved by Linda, and by Heather, convinced him he was good.”
― Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

“Companies, and rulers, who learn to cultivate their conscious ignorance—to be fascinated, even obsessed, by what they don’t know—are the ones least likely to be caught unaware by change.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“It reminds us that knowledge is inherently unreliable.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

“Humans became the only species to acquire guidance on how to live from the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors, rather than just from their DNA.”
― Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It