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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"The thing about how that process works is that it's more about the editing and time for judging the ideas. Most pieces I publish each week have been around for months. This is a response to the beginning of the strip, when I was making them so quickly. I would just conceive a piece, finish it, and then the next day see it in the paper. That was when I was doing dailies four days a week."
"Throughout human history, the American Idea has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed."
"When our opponents on the Left have no serious ideas of their own, they resort to emotional appeals that play up Americans’ fears about the future."
"Just as it is important in Latin America to discuss ideas that come from North America, I think it is interesting for North Americans to discuss ideas that come from Latin America or Africa and do not insert themselves into capitalist interests."
"Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion."
"The person who is right is the person who is the strongest, in this case, paradoxically, it's the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else."
"Let go of the idea that the path will lead you to your goal. The truth is that with each step we take, we arrive. Repeat that to yourself every morning: 'I've arrived.' That way you'll find it much easier to stay in touch with each second of your day."
"The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion."
"It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are."
"Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?""
"As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel."
"It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning."
"In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort."
"Books are certainly old fashioned, but only people with a very limited perception are silly enough to condemn ideas because of their age. It is, of course, equally silly to condemn the new fangled simply because it is strange."
"The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective - the race - is the source of his identity and value. ... The notion of 'diversity' entails exactly the same premises as racism - that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage."
"I could not sleep when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; ...This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west."
"Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness."
"It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe."
"On trade, our hypocrisy is at its most appalling. Trade reform isn't about charity, it's about justice, and this campaign, Trade Justice is an unstoppable idea."
"A good marriage is loving someone in a lot of different circumstances. Respect for them and their views and ideas and the life that they're leading with you. Shared values and interests. A good sense of humour. And a little volatility along the way."
