Ideas Quotes

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

John Maynard Keynes

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.

Judge John Kane, US District Court

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.

C. D. Jackson

The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas - A trial of spiritual resolve the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.

Ronald Reagan

The wise only possess ideas the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Spinoza

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

Warren Bennis

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

William Lippmann

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

David H. Comins

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

Mohandas Ghandi

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

Georg Brandes

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

Don Marquis

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

Chinese Prove

But any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood, and that is what happened to Jesus.

Henry Louis Mencken

We hate the very idea that our own ideas may be mistaken, so we cling dogmatically to our conjectures.

Karl Poppe

Life - Transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

Bell Hooks, O Magazine, December 2003

Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.

Bishop Vincent

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas and the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., (dissent, Abrams v. United States, 1919)

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

Voltaire

Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.

Bruce Lee

God is really only another artist, he made the elephat, giraffe and cat. He has no real style but keeps trying new ideas.

Pablo Picasso

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

Miriam Beard

The best ideas are common property.

Seneca, Epistles

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal but ideas are immortal.

Richard Adams

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Gaston Bachelard

Reading transports me. I can go anywhere and never leave my chair. It lets me shake hands with new ideas.

Rolfe Neill

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Napoleon Hill

Ideas control the world.

James Abram Garfield

My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent With the awful order of things.

Mary Manin Boggs

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.

A. Whitney Griswold

Mathematics is a vast adventure in ideas; its history reflects some of the noblest thoughts of countless generations.

Dirk Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics, vol. I

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non - Westerners never do.

Samuel P. Huntington

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - At the age of fifty, say - That a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about... It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.

Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

Some have half - Baked ideas because their ideals are not heated up enough.

Author Unknown