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Quotes about ideas

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Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Ch. 24, p. 383
- Economics
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
When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.
Robin Wall Kimmererborn 1953Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), p. 258
Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Peter Kropotkin1842–1921Letter to Vladimir Lenin (21 December 1920); as quoted in Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 426
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Ursula K. Le Guin1929–2018The Dispossessed (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 72)
Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.
Vladimir Lenin1870–1924What is to be Done? (1902)
- Science
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
- Reading
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke1632–1704An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in
There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.
Audre Lorde1934–1992Learning from the 60s
Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
David Lynch1946–2025Catching the Big Fish (2006), Introduction, p. 1
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Thomas Mann1875–1955The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6
- Debate
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Thomas Mann1875–1955Tonio Kröger (1902)
We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
Thomas Mann1875–1955Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2
- Anger
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Karl Marx1818–1883The Communist Manifesto (1848)In context
- Power
Now the world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
W. Somerset Maugham1874–1965Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)
- Anger