Words of Wisdom

Ernie Banks was a Hall of Fame baseball player who spent his entire 19-year career with the Chicago Cubs. Despite his vast personal success, Banks never won a World Series ring.

"I am proud to have been in a business that gives pleasure, creates beauty, and awakens our conscience, arouses compassion, and perhaps most importantly, gives millions a respite from our so violent world."

Edwin H. Land was an American scientist and inventor best known for inventing the Polaroid instant camera. He was a major influence on Apple's Steve Jobs.

The late popular science writer felt very strongly that facts and theories should be understood to be two separate things.

"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."

In case you missed it from earlier this week, retired NBA Commissioner David Stern visited Big Think to discuss the NBA's legacy of diversity.

In case you missed it from earlier this week, retired U.S. Congressman Barney Frank recently visited Big Think to discuss the rhetorical power of humor.

Word of wisdom from the famed British conductor: "A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence."

"To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed."  

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."

Joseph Joubert was a French essayist whose collected works were not published until after his death in 1824.

"Discrimination still exists. Some people feel that their own beliefs are being threatened. Some are unhappy about unfamiliar cultures. They all need to be reassured that there is so much to be gained by reaching out to others; that diversity is indeed a strength and not a threat."

"Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us." -Cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky  

"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence."

"I believe in democracy, but in real democracy, not a phony democracy in which just powerful people can speak. For me, in a democracy everyone speaks."

"The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice."

"You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you … It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps."

"If someone is to consider black and white for their project I guess I would say the heads up that I would offer is that they need to be prepared to fight for it and lobby for that... Connections are not in color or in black and white. They’re invisible but just as real."

"If we’re going to solve the problems that we’re trying to solve – and it’s not just for the Foundation, it’s for all of us, we’ve got to tap into the creativity and the capability and the innovation potential of the private sector." -Julie Sunderland of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, from her recent Big Think Interview  

"Be patient with the belligerence of the simple-minded. It is not easy to understand that one doesn’t understand." -Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 19th century Austrian novelist

"Research can be undertaken in any kind of environment, as long as you have the interest. I believe that true education means fostering the ability to be interested in something."

"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject."

"Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system."  

"My passion is actually for people. So the exploration into different musics of different times has to do with trying to figure out who these people are, what this music represents and what context do we want to give it and what does it mean to us right now."

"I like to say, the universe doesn't care about our common sense.  We have to force our ideas to conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around.  And if reality seems strange, that’s okay." -Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss, from his Big Think interview  

"Companies really want inclusion but they often predicate that inclusion on the surrender of various forms of diversity that people bring to the table. So the idea is that if you modulate your outsider identity to adopt mainstream behaviors then you’ll be included. And so it puts people to this tragic choice between their identity and inclusion."

"Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist."

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation."

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down." -Jack Kerouac

Canadian physician Lt. Col. John McCrae composed this poem after presiding over the funeral of a friend killed at the 2nd Battle of Ypres in 1915.