Quotes About Ideas

The greatest ideas are the simplest. Now there was something to be done they worked with passion.

The justices were not appointed to roam at large in the realm of public policy and strike down laws that offend their own ideas of what is desirable and what is undesirable.

Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.

The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed?

What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.

We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.

I have so many ideas; there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know; one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any.

How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be

Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

we've seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we'll see that the right stories make people act.

Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think.

Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it's focused. As jazz great Charles Mingus famously said, "You can't improvise on nothing, man; you've gotta improvise on something.

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it. But in surprising people, in breaking their guessing machines, how do we avoid gimmicky surprise, like the wolves? The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience's guessing machines that relates to your core message. We

The point of the Clinics is not to wow you with our creative genius, and it's fortunate for readers and authors alike that this is not the goal, because we are not creative geniuses. The point is simply to model the process of making ideas stickier. In contrast to traditional disclaimers, this is something you should try at home. Think about each message and consider how you would improve it using the principles in the book.

In the last few chapters, we've seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we'll see that the right stories make people act.

There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

We can't unlearn what we already know and there are only two ways to beat the curse, the first is not to learn anything, the second is to transform our ideas.