Creativity Suppression Quotes

I think we are slowly killing liberty, creativity, intelligent thinking; it's as if we are being led into a world that is like a huge shopping centre, with a sort of anaesthesia about everything except the choice of goods in front of us.

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Time clocks rob the world of wild possibility. That's what they're for.

We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.

If Beethoven were sent to nursery school today, they would medicate him, and he would be a postal clerk.

China restricts the society's freedom of speech. The Communist Party imposes these limits because it lacks confidence towards the future and has no ideals. Nowadays, China is experiencing the detrimental effects of such decisions. Its citizens have no creativity.

As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're gonna be alright. But if you go beyond that then you're gonna have these grave doubts that give you stomach problems, headachesmake you want to go out and do something else. So, I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming out.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

Young kids are always singing and painting. When you get to that second and third grade level, you're supposed to put all that aside.

Where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.

Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different.

I'm a very creative person, but that side of me was suppressed because I was academic. I was depressed at school, and I didn't know why.

Something happens to our creativity as we go through the education process; most of us lose touch with it.

Interestingly, the British government announced a few weeks ago that they were going to introduce 500 educational targets for preschool children. And teachers complained that “when are the children going to have time to play?” Well, they’re not supposed to play, because play is a right-brain, ad-lib, creative pursuit. The idiot politicians who are introducing it don’t understand this, but the shadow-people from which it is generated certainly do. They want to stimulate the left brain as early as possible.

There are no such men today. We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time.