Quotes About Ideas

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor! Here

There are two ideas at the base of today's globe-spanning environmental movement. One is that Homo sapiens, like every other species, is bound by biological laws. The second is that one of these laws is that no species can long exceed the environment's carrying capacity.

Historians provide many reasons for this extraordinary transition, high among them the fierce opposition of slaves themselves. But another important cause is that abolitionists convinced people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human society for millennia was made over by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.

But a central element was the power of ideas—the voices and actions of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In recent years something similar may have occurred with gay rights: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, perhaps, a slow movement to equality.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

Scientists are the destroyers of myths and sometimes the myths they destroy are there own.

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention.

If they're smart enough to be useful they get ideas about making themselves indispensable—ideas about getting above their station, as you Brits would put it. If they're too dumb to be useful they're a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down.

Creativity consists of coming up with many ideas, not just that one great idea.

My ideas are laughable. I am a pompous clown. I can, on occasion, become aware of this. There are moments of clarity that I find all the more humiliating because I can see myself as others likely do, but I cannot control any of it.

That we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking.

We may accept limitations on our actions but never . . . on our thinking.

Incluso las ideas se pueden considerar abundantes, en cierto modo, porque es posible propagarlas sin límite debido a su naturaleza «no competitiva». Como escribió Thomas Jefferson, el creador del sistema de patentes en Estados Unidos: «Quien recibe una idea de mí, recibe una instrucción para él sin disminuir la mía; como aquel que enciende su vela en la mía, recibe luz sin dejarme en la oscuridad».

Otro aspecto esencial del código abierto es que los usuarios pueden fabricar los productos por sí mismos, si quieren; no necesitan pagar por ello. Lo cual es magnífico para el 0,1 por ciento del usuario básico, que muchas veces es la mejor fuente de ideas e innovaciones en torno al producto. Pero la realidad es que el otro 99,9 por ciento de usuarios más bien pagarían para que alguien se los fabricase si les garantizan que funcionarán. Éste es el

Once you stumble across a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime idea for a book, it's hard to treat that story with the irreverent disregard needed to transform it from a great idea into a workable rough draft. When you give yourself just one month to flesh out your concept, you won't have time to feel overly protective of your ideas. And you will therefore stand a much better chance of bringing them to life.

The human imagination, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, says that poverty is "the worst of crimes" and "all the other crimes are virtues beside it," his impassioned declaration elucidates the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw's socialist tracts.

The coach is a human being and does not demand miracles from human beings. He has the humility to understand that there are other people with different ideas to his own, but he does not have to use those words.

If you're not going to have consequences to a bad decision or to mislead Congress or any other aspect of life, that only incubates people to hatch bigger ideas that are not forthright and not abiding by the law.

We are excellent at launching Tomahawk missiles; we need to get better at launching ideas.

I first moved to Denver to work with a group called YWAM, 'Youth With a Mission.' I was a kid - I was 18 - and did some work with homeless people. Really, trying to convert people is sort of an awful position to find yourself in, so I quickly, on my own, grew out of religious ideas.

Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.

You can say that I endorse Mitt Romney, but that's not just because I'm a white man. We all have things which we're for and ideas which we support.

The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.

I like the mode of business of aviation. It's a risky business with difficulties which you can fill with innovative ideas and different things.