Quotes on Ideas

Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.

The United States is the only power in history that became great by giving and not by taking. I think the crisis was when the United States had more money than ideas. Money doesn't produce money. Ideas produce money.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

It’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, it’s very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers and the creators. They are the magic people of the world.

My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with.

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.

I feel no disgust when I hear the confessions of those near their end, whose wounds are full of maggots...This may give you some idea of my daily work. Picture to yourself a collection of huts with 800 Lepers. No doctor; in fact, as there is no cure, there seems no place for a doctor's skill.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

There may be some substitute for hard facts, but if there is, I have no idea what it can be.

We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.

The idea is that flowing water never goes stale, so just keep on flowing.

When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy, that is what cooking is all about.

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.

I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.