Time & Perspective Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono is poking at a polite superstition: that language is a neutral tool, faithfully labeling reality. He flips it. Words don’t just describe; they fossilize. A term is a snapshot of how some earlier crowd carved up the world, then it gets handed down like a rulebook. The insult is subtle: what we call “knowledge” can be a museum of old categories, and the docent is our own vocabulary.

The line works because it reframes “encyclopedia” from authority to liability. An encyclopedia promises completeness; de Bono’s twist is that it archives what we didn’t know yet. The subtext is classic lateral-thinking de Bono: the enemy isn’t ignorance in the simple sense, it’s the confidence that comes from naming. Once you’ve got a word, you stop looking. The label becomes an alibi for not updating your perception.

Context matters here. Writing in the late 20th century, de Bono watched institutions (education, management, politics) mistake verbal fluency for insight. His broader project was to make thinking visible and improvable, not merely eloquent. So this is a critique of “frozen” conceptual habits: stereotypes, bureaucratic jargon, inherited scientific frames, even moral terms that smuggle old assumptions into new debates. “Insist we continue” personifies words as tyrants, but the real target is us: we let inherited language do our thinking, then call it clarity. His provocation is a demand for linguistic humility - and for the courage to invent better distinctions when the old ones start lying.