quotations about ideas
Great ideas and great melodies have a lot in common.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, 2002
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
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
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
There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color.
SCOTT ADAMS
Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life: Dispatches from Cubicleland
Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions
Ideas are the pulses of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Ideas lead revolutions.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
Every man believes that if he could get capital interested, he could set the world on fire with his ideas.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
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
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
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
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
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
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
BOB DYLAN
"Maggie's Farm"
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay