IDEA QUOTES IV

quotations about ideas

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

GRACE HOPPER

attributed, Built to Learn


Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions


A good idea becomes great when the people are ready. The individual who is impatient with people will be defective in leadership. The evidence of strength lies not in streaking ahead, but in adapting your stride to the slower pace of others while not forfeiting your lead. If we run too far ahead, we lose our power to influence.

JOHN C. MAXWELL

Developing the Leader Within You


The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

American Note-Books, 1836

Tags: Nathaniel Hawthorne


Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.

LOUISE ERDRICH

Tracks

Tags: Louise Erdrich


No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Crack-Up

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product.

HENRY FORD

introduction, My Life and Work


Ideas lead revolutions.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims

Tags: Edward Counsel


I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Elric: The Stealer of Souls


I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane

BOB DYLAN

"Maggie's Farm"

Tags: Bob Dylan


New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.

MAX PLANCK

addressing the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, January 1936


The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.

HOWARD ZINN

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train


To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Tyrannies are overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

Tags: Henry Ward Beecher


Our ideas ... must first acquire a certain strength, before we can proceed efficiently to act upon them. They have their periods of immaturity and maturity. First comes the germ of the idea; then its growth; then an enlargement of that growth; then an expansion of that enlargement; until finally the idea takes its ultimate form as a picture, a book, or a revolution.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

"Beyond Action and Reaction", The Art of Being Ruled


People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

SAUL BELLOW

Conversations with Saul Bellow

Tags: Saul Bellow


If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

LINUS PAULING

attributed, "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology", 1995


It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

EDWIN H. LAND

attributed, Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture


Indiscriminate ideological suspicion of any idea, without the urge to exalt an idea of one's own, will discourage rather than promote lucidity.

ERNST BLOCH

Man on His Own