Quotes on Ideas

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.

I think most of us are raised with preconceived notions of the choices we're supposed to make. We waste so much time making decisions based on someone else's idea of our happiness - what will make you a good citizen or a good wife or daughter or actress. Nobody says, 'Just be happy - go be a cobbler or go live with goats.'

Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the way they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.

The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.

The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas

Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.

A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.

I sort of recognize it, as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that's a good idea, that's a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like 'not,' you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get.

We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

The first gesture of an architect is to draw a perimeter; in other words, to separate the microclimate from the macro space outside. This in itself is a sacred act. Architecture in itself conveys this idea of limiting space. It's a limit between the finite and the infinite. From this point of view, all architecture is sacred.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.