“I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers: they look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.” – Sidney Harman

What CEOs read – it’s not business books: Steve Jobs once had a huge William Blake collection; Phil Knight has an Asian art and poetry library; Michael Moritz mentions Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Dee Hock’s favorite is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. “If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: ‘Don’t follow your…more

“So I’ve got a god in the room here. I know a lot about gods and I have found what god this is by the way it behaves. This is the God of the Old Testament: a lot of rules and no mercy. And if he catches you picking up sticks on Saturday you’re finished”…more

“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now…more

Kerouac, visualized

“If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily. But we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life.” – Ray Kurzweil, searching…more

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

“We’ve made great strides in integration, yet I think we’ll be integrating into a burning house…and we’re going to just have to become firefighters” – Dr. Martin Luther King to Harry Belafonte, just before his death 40 years ago today.

New designs for British coins – H.O.T.T. Definitely need to get a full set of these in London this summer.