Ideas Quotes

Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Alfred North Whitehead

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non - Westerners never do.

Samuel P. Huntington

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.

Karl Kraus

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals of American society.

Robert Francis Kennedy

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Matthew Arnold

Dreams, ideas, and plans not only are an escape, they give me purpose, a reason to hang on.

Steven Patrick Callahan

Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible.

Pearl Bailey

There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal.

The National, Paris, 1850

Ours is the age of substitutes instead of language, we have jargon instead of principles, slogans and instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

Eric Bentley

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

Helen Kelle

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

Anatole France

The real giants have been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.

Bill Bernbach

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Theodore Harold White

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.

C. D. Jackson

You have to let people challenge your ideas.

Tom Kasten, VP, Levi Strauss and Co.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Henry Ward Beeche

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange 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.

George Bernard Shaw

Successful innovators recognize that discovery of great ideas come from looking at the same thing as everyone else and observing something different.

Reed Markham, Author, Effective Speechwriting

My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent With the awful order of things.

Mary Manin Boggs

At the center of each human heart is goodness, layered over with hurt, confusion, and mistaken ideas. Our task is to gently peel off layer after layer until the unfettered heart can shed its love upon the world.

Sue Patton Thoele, The Courage To Be Yourself Journal

Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official - - Not to say arbitrary - - In their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity.

William Adams

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

Voltaire

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

Mohandas Ghandi

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.

Albert Einstein

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

H. L. Mencken

From social intercourse are derived some of the highest enjoyments of life; where there is a free interchange of sentiments the mind acquires new ideas, and by frequent exercise of its powers, the understanding gains fresh vigor.

Joseph Addison

The wise only possess ideas the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I only expect to live only about a hundred years.

Thomas Alva Edison

I will ignore all ideas for new works on engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for whose improvements I see no further hope.

Sextus Julius Frontinus

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - - The things we live by and teach our children - - Are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

Walt Disney

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Napoleon Hill

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

Unknown

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

Klemens Von Metternich

At least two - Thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Aldous Huxley

Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.

J. William Galbraith