Quotes About Ideas

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, of Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the thirteenth century.

No writer, in truth, is ever really a free agent. What he does in his trade is determined not only by his immediate environment and the ideational currents of his time, but also and more especially by the play of inherited forces and predispositions within him.

Bad ideas offer explanations of experience that do not reflect reality. They read into life what is not there. Often we embrace invalid ideas because they have not been clearly stated and therefore cannot be evaluated. In our culture, influenced as it is by mass media, we are bombarded by ridiculous concepts that are deliberately left vague so we will act without thinking.

Ideas and their creators run the world…one's place in the world is due partially to the ideas that a culture has forced on one and/or the ideas that a person "freely" accepts and uses.

Dr Syngmann: Gott ist der Gott der Juden, sage ich! Deswegen sollst du ihn in Ruhe lassen, John. Was du gestohlen hast, wird niemals deins. Die Juden könne diese Gottesliebe verklagen und sie ins Zuchthaus bringen nach der Berner Konvention, die für Diebstahl von Patenten und Ideen schwere Strafen androht.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

The right sort (of story) come of themselves: they tap at my forehead and say 'Here we are.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

Egalitarian and relativistic sentiments find steady support among ever new generations of adolescents. Owing to their still incomplete mental development, juveniles, especially of the male variety, are always susceptible to both ideas.

if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.

For entrepreneurs, choosing your co-founders is like a professional marriage. You're going to go through tough times, and you need to remember that ideas can change, but business partners can't.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I'd just write.

The Moon! Mars! Asteroids! Rockets! Helium 3! Space solar power! Space tourism! We go through fads, swarm around the hero de jour, and spend far too much time trashing the other guy's ideas in favor of our own.

A band that makes records and tours is also a business. That's usually where a lot of disagreements come. It's four guys who are musicians and don't really know much about business, but are very passionate and have very specific ideas.

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

Many of our ideas of what love is comes from stories... these are extremely powerful shapers of our attitudes towards love, and I think that, in some ways, often we've got the wrong story.

There are people who kind of gravitate towards running politics based on new ideas and issues, and that was what the secret was for Clinton.

The enmity of such a party towards Socialism does not mean that the members are only prejudiced against it because they do not know it; it means that they are possessed of bourgeois ideas, and wish to determine their policy accordingly.

There is a firm, clear commitment to provide resources and ideas to enable us to organize the Afghans towards starting the process of rehabilitation and reconstruction.