Albert O. Hirschman Quotes & Sayings

To be acceptable, it seems, a project must often be billed as a pure replica of a successful venture in an advanced country. — Albert O. Hirschman

The secret of creativity is then to place yourself in situations where you've got to be creative, but this is done only when one doesn't know in advance that one will have to be creative. This, in turn, is so because we underestimate our creative resources; quite properly, we cannot believe in our creativity until we experience it; and since we thus necessarily underestimate our creative resources we do not consciously engage upon tasks which we know require such resources; hence the only way in which we can bring our creative resources into play is by similarly underestimating the difficulty of a task. — Albert O. Hirschman

in certain societies there is a systematic underestimate of one's own creativity — Albert O. Hirschman

In real-life situations, however, risks frequently increase without any corresponding increase in the payoff: — Albert O. Hirschman

Creativity always comes a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity that it will turn out to be — Albert O. Hirschman

History is nothing if not far-fetched. — Albert O. Hirschman