7 Quotes & Sayings By Ian Leslie

Ian Leslie was born in Bournemouth, England in 1941. He attended Bristol University, where he gained a degree in mathematics and a PhD in chemistry. He then worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire. In 1977 he became a full-time writer and has since written over one hundred books on a wide range of subjects for children and adults Read more

In 1995 he won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with his novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz. In 2009 he was made a CBE for services to children's literature.

1
Ignorance as a deliberate choice, can be used to reinforce prejudice and discrimination. Ian Leslie
2
... knowing what not to know was itself indispensable knowledge. Ian Leslie
3
Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds. Ian Leslie
4
Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 talk on educational reform–entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”–has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless. . Ian Leslie
5
It's only people, as far as we know, who look up at the stars and wonder what they are. Ian Leslie
6
[Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. Ian Leslie