Quotes by Ken Robinson

We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)

Many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface.

Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and its produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.

Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they dont feel theyre good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or havent yet put the work in to develop them.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. Its much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that arent present here and now.

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.

If youre running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether its an advertising company or whether youre running a hospital.

The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.

Now the problem with standardized tests is that its based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we cant, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a students education.

What youre doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.