Ideas Quotes

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

A handsome parson is fit for nothing but ti put ideas into the young woman's heads.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. in the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

The key to every man is his thought.... He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepare to see them misunderstood.

People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

The best ideas are common property.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

We need men who can dream of things that never were.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten but they may start a winning game.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.