Quotes About Ideas

While Trump was talking about the wall, Senator Rand Paul—one of Trump's Republican primary challengers—had a number of smart ideas that got no traction whatsoever. Paul presented his ideas as concepts without visuals. They died on arrival.

Attached are pages from Balthasar's book that discuss your book.195 I've started a little dialogue with him on his criticisms of you (natural theology, God's wrath, etc.).196 I know teachers who are starting to take you seriously because Balthasar finds your ideas at least very interesting. So this criticism is beneficial when people engage with your books.

One of the most common questions writers are asked is Where do you get your ideas? But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.

Consider a man confined within his bounds, influenced by impressions, beset by ideas, till one day a growing passion overthrows his contemplative composure and destroys him.

Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.

There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself that Providence moves, too. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

The human race is being reprogrammed. Young people everywhere suddenly became pacifists in the 1960s after a millennium of violence. Our world was invaded, but not by the hordes of Martians and Venusians envisioned by the flying-saucer believers. We were invaded by new ideas and a new inner structure that would help guide us to the anticipated crises of the 1990s.

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.

As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected ... before a drop of blood was shed.

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.

Few things in this world are more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas.

One can lose a good idea by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.

First, it is important to remember that the origin of Freud's model lay, not in his clinical work with patients, but in ideas he had learned previously from his teachers—the physiologist Brücke, the psychiatrist Meynert, and the physician Breuer.

Population thinking is itself a population of mental and public things. Philosophers' discussions of what population thinking really is are members of this population. So is the text you just read, and so is your reading of it.

To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The trick was to inhibit the easy, obvious, but ineffective attempts, permitting a better solution

psychologists are too polite with one another's ideas.

Ideas' is right. I hardly do any detailed design anymore, I have people who are better at it than I am. But a craftsman is not necessarily an artist. He needs that something extra that only comes from the cold heart of the universe.

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

Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.

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

Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt... reading releases you from the limits of yourself.

literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning.

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.

We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.