Ideas quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ideas — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In this day of wonders no one will say that a thing or an idea is worthless because it is new. To say it is impossible because it is difficult is again not in consonance with the spirit of the age. Things undreamt of are daily being seen, the impossible is ever becoming possible."
"Americans are sick of the idea of the government taking over everything and trying to run it. We don't know how to run a bank, a car company."
"I think that plain old intellectualism [can be] a more powerful force than the idea of the femme fatale."
"There is a big misunderstanding about the idea of naturalness. Most people who come to us believing in some freedom or naturalness, but their understanding is what we call [heretical naturalness] ... a kind of "let-alone policy" or sloppiness... For a plant or stone to be natural is no problem. But for us there is some problem, indeed a big problem. To be natural is something we must work on."
"True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain."
"In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something."
"Ideas come and go, stories stay."
"Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea."
"The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story."
"Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do."
"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."
"Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image."
"This idea that people have to love and understand each other is absurd. It's not human nature."
"They know you can't get people to stop smoking, so they develop a system of informants. That's the whole idea of second-hand smoke, you know. Make second-hand smoke dangerous and turn everybody against smokers. Then they say you can't even smoke in a bar - a bar! - because bartenders have a right to a smoke-free "workspace." Ah, bartenders, those health nuts."
"One should not be too distracted by definitions. Ideas transcend definitions."
"Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education."
"But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it."
"There are people here [in South Africa] who, whatever the debate is on a particular issue, their dominating idea is that at the end of the debate we must emerge stronger than we were before and closer to one another."
"What we did was to try and exploit that spirit [the idea of giving], which was there even before I approached individual South Africans [to give to the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund]. I think we must start from that angle."
"London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm."
