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Quotes about ideas

115 quotes from 89 people

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Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego’s defenses and into the open mind.
John Mayerborn 1977Esquire magazine (November 1, 2004)
- Music
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956
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 proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.
Ludwig von Mises1881–1973Theory of Money and Credit (1912)
In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.
Ludwig von Mises1881–1973Liberalism (1927), Ch. 1: The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 10. The Argument of Fascism
- Power
To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world.
Alan Mooreborn 1953De Abaitua interview (1998)
Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map.
Alan Mooreborn 1953“What Is Reality?” (written for television)
It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.
Napoleon1769–1821
Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.
Barack Obamaborn 1961A New Beginning (June 2009)
- Freedom
Mandela demonstrated that action and ideas are not enough. No matter how right, they must be chiseled into law and institutions.
Barack Obamaborn 1961Eulogy of Nelson Mandela (December 2013)
- Laws
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
George Orwell1903–1950“The Freedom of the Press”, unused preface to Animal Farm (1945), published in Times Literary Supplement (15 September 1972)
- Thinking
An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.
Thomas Paine1737–1809Agrarian Justice (1797)
- War & Peace
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter1919–1990Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 362
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night.
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)In context
- Thinking
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl Popper1902–1994Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972)
- Thinking