quotations about ideas
If you're going to deal in the world of ideas, you have to be, to some extent, a salesman. And you're going to sink or rise according to your ability to be a good salesman of ideas.
BARRY DILLER
Playboy, Jul. 1989
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
LINUS PAULING
attributed, "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology", 1995
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
GRACE HOPPER
attributed, Built to Learn
Ideas are the pulses of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Every man believes that if he could get capital interested, he could set the world on fire with his ideas.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
A good idea becomes great when the people are ready. The individual who is impatient with people will be defective in leadership. The evidence of strength lies not in streaking ahead, but in adapting your stride to the slower pace of others while not forfeiting your lead. If we run too far ahead, we lose our power to influence.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Developing the Leader Within You
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.
HENRY FORD
introduction, My Life and Work
I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.
MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Elric: The Stealer of Souls
Great ideas and great melodies have a lot in common.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, 2002
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, 1836
Our ideas ... must first acquire a certain strength, before we can proceed efficiently to act upon them. They have their periods of immaturity and maturity. First comes the germ of the idea; then its growth; then an enlargement of that growth; then an expansion of that enlargement; until finally the idea takes its ultimate form as a picture, a book, or a revolution.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
Ideas lead revolutions.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
BOB DYLAN
"Maggie's Farm"
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
SAUL BELLOW
Conversations with Saul Bellow
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture
Indiscriminate ideological suspicion of any idea, without the urge to exalt an idea of one's own, will discourage rather than promote lucidity.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own