If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.
Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.
They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.
What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.
My parents are professors; they're intellectual. I spent a lot of time reading books. To me, everyone always looks like they do in your imagination. And in my imagination, the characters always looked like me.
Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
You have to really use your imagination to refresh your daily life.
Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.
I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention.
My imagination was really hyperactive as a child and animated. I had those elements, but as you live and go through the hardships, it fades. 'Pete's Dragon' reawakened that. It rekindled the feeling of the invisible dragon.
Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.
Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.
All art, from the paintings on the walls of cave dwellers to art created today, is autobiographical because it comes from the secret place in the soul where imagination resides.
Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.