Ken Robinson

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value

Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies.

The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it's to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they're valued.

You create your life, and you can recreate it, too. In times of economic downturn and uncertainty, it's more important than ever to look deep inside yourself to fathom the sort of life you really want to lead and the talents and passions that can make that possible.

Children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations. Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up.

Imagination is the source of all human achievement.

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 You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

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.

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.

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

Human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. … It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

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

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.

Typically [professors] live in their heads. … They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.

Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.

The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.