Quotes About Ideas

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it's the only one you have. • Emil-Auguste Chartier, Propos sur la religion, 1938

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, "It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.

If you're like most of our readers, you're probably wondering where we get all the ideas for our books from. Well, sometimes we think them up. Other times they are based on stuff that actually happens. Like this book, for instance. It all started one morning when I got up and went down to get some breakfast.

I don't know anybody who doesn't have a fantasy. Everybody must have a fantasy.

Astonishingly, ideas as spurious as the blood libel are still very much with us, having found a large cult of believers in the Muslim world.

My view is that no idea is above scrutiny, and no people are beneath dignity.

I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names—which is an easy way to ignore your ideas. Besides

Information is good, but to spot ideas, you want insights. Lots of them. Because ideas aren't spotted in forms. They're spotted in sights -- those revelatory insights seized only when you roam new turfs, meet new people and have new experiences.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.

Creative people have more ideas and interests than any one person can do in a lifetime, and we accumulate the paraphernalia to prove it. (p. 54.)

Libraries represent the sole contemporary American institution with the potential for making available a wide-ranging, genuinely diverse spectrum of opinions, cultural expressions, and ideas in an environment that is commercial-free and huckster-free, a commons where people can gather and select, in an un-intimidating atmosphere, whatever interests them, delights them, or even repels them--whatever they want to know about.

To be inventive, to have ideas, is an organic part of being talented.

I]deas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences.

In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that our Revolutionary War had on our French allies, "What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government—their cutting, not their sewing.

There's the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble.

AM fascinated by the profusion and ingenuity of Jewish ideas on the future of Israel.

There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas.

Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

Sometimes I like to think I live with ghosts. Not from my past, but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas, floating around too, but they usually don't last that long. They're more like mayflies; they're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they fall to the floor, dead, about twenty four hours later.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them.

The challenge was that the bad ideas sounded terrific to the uninformed person. You couldn't kill these particular bad ideas with logic because the arguments against them would be too complicated. You had to go in through the back door.

There are two types of people in the world, my young friend. One type is people-oriented. When they make conversation, it is about people—what people are doing, what someone said, how someone feels. The other group is idea-oriented. When they make conversation, they talk about ideas and concepts and objects.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.