Temple Grandin Quotes

The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgements and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world. (p2)

At first I thought engineering could make all the improvements happen, but later in my career I learned that good engineering and design must be coupled with good management. (p296)

Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces. (p287)

Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise. (p217)

Breeders need to realize that they can't have everything. There's a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three. You have to pick two. It's true with genetics too. (p200)

All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. (p5)

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors. (p3)

(What do you like to read or watch for entertainment?) I like Arthur C. Clark and David Brinn. I loved the movies Avatar and Gravity. My favorite science fiction TV show was the original Star Trek. My favorite science fiction movies are 2001: A Space Odyssey and Avatar. For reading materials on the plane, I read The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Business Week, and many others. At home I read Science, Nature, Beef Magazine, National Hog Farmer, Feedstuff, New Scientist, and The New Yorker.

I hate violent images in the movies. Since I think in pictures, it is difficult to get these images out of my memory. I do not want this bad stuff in my memory. Reading about violence does not upset me, it is seeing it. Cartoon violence and car crashes have no effect. The images I want to avoid are realistic depictions of torture and cruelty.

One thing that worries me is seeing, for example, the guys at the Jet Propulsion Lab who are my age. They are eccentric geeks. What would happen to the younger version of these people today? Would they have a fun job where they're the navigator for the Mars rover or would they be playing video games in a basement somewhere?

the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

Complementary skills are the key to successful teams.

The true measure of an education isn't what grades a student gets today, but where they are 10 years later.

I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding.

We hear a great deal about the need to fix the infrastructure in this country, but we are too focused on the things that need improving and updating rather than the people who will be able to do the work.