Quotes on Power Of Ideas

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

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I've had periods in my life when I've had a bundle of ideas come along, and I've had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I'll do something. If not, I won't do a damn thing.

After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system,' many companies must relearn instead to trust their people - and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

Our work has only begun. In our time we have an historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom and that will therefore deepen and extend the peace. And I use the word power broadly, because even more important than military and indeed economic power is the power of ideas, the power of compassion, and the power of hope.

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself.

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.