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Quotes about ideas

115 quotes from 89 people

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This world is but canvas to our imaginations.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Wednesday
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill1874–1965Speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943 (full text, audio).
- Knowledge
There’s nothing that’s ever happened in the world that didn’t start in one human mind.
Tom Clancy1947–2013In Depth with Tom Clancy (2002)
Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
Voltaire1694–1778Letter to Élie Bertrand (5 January 1759)
In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.
Carl Sagan1934–1996Broca’s Brain (1979), Chapter 25, “The Amniotic Universe” (p. 364)
- Fear
It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them.
Philip K. Dick1928–1982“Philip K Dick speech (interpreter edited out) in Metz, France, 1977”, ~28:00
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.
Søren Kierkegaard1813–1855On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
- Time
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Letter to Dr. H. L. Gordon (May 3, 1949—AEA 58-217) as quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson
- Experience
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956“The Divine Afflatus” in New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917)
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
Salman Rushdieborn 1947Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)
- Anti-Religion
The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.
Ludwig von Mises1881–1973Theory of Money and Credit (1912)
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
Edith Wharton1862–1937The Writing of Fiction (1925), ch. I
- Art
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Thomas Mann1875–1955Tonio Kröger (1902)
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
Mark Twain1835–1910Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935)
- Politics
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 1
- History