Quotes About Ideas

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

Maybe that's why young people make success. They don't know enough. Because when you know enough it's obvious that every idea that you have is no good.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.

We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.

Few moderns may think of the linear development of human history in the same terms the old Christians used, but the modern world of ideas is unimaginable without the irreversible linearity of connection and direction they provided. Everyone on the planet recognizes the Christian scheme of marking and pointing time's arrow, even when we noncommittally mark our dates BCE/ CE.

When oppressed by severe study, he sometimes sent for me to say that he had applied himself so closely to a matter that he found his ideas running around in a circle, and was in need of help to find a tangent. Our personal relations remained as sincere after the war until politics came between us in 1867.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides

Except for a roll of Harding's eyes, everyone ignored me, which is the way I liked it when I had to hang around with senior officers. They had a way of thinking up ideas that got you killed and them promoted.

There used to be an intellectual class in America. . . . These people kept the world of ideas alive. But today the distinction between intellectuals and nonintellectuals doesn't make any difference; celebrity is the only standard. . . . Everybody has become a talker of cheap philosophy that anybody can pick up.

History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.

It was said in the office "that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.

I do think that only a very rigid and conforming society could have produced the ideas of an eccentric in the first place.

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.

By using our freedoms, I do not means just joining demonstrations, political parties, and so on and so forth, which is only part of the democratic process, but examining ideas, from whatever source they come, to see how they may usefully contribute to our lives and o the societies we live in.

She was well armed with facts from The New Statesman, She was even better armed by the conviction of being in the right, but what is the use of being right if one is faced by the blank, unaltered stare of satisfied ignorance? Martha was so new to the game that she was surprised by Mrs. Buss's calm remark, Oh, well, everyone's entitled to their ideas. She said it was not a question of ideas, but one of fact.

our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts—things. There was no way of knowing an ancient society's ideas except through the barrier of our own.

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.

if ever you want to commit a murder, the thing you've got to do is to prevent people from associatin' their ideas. Most people don't associate anythin'—their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?

Most people don't associate anythin'--their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?

The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it.