“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”

“It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”

“If we dump all the machinery and take the knowledge we have in the ocean within six months humanity will die. If we dump all the politician all around the world in the ocean everything will go along very nicely.”

“I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.”

“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

“The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.”