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Ideas

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A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience. ~ Albert Einstein
A man to whom it has been given to bless the world with a great creative idea has no need for the praise of posterity. His very achievement has already conferred a higher boon upon him. ~ Albert Einstein
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death. ~ John F. Kennedy
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. ~ John Maynard Keynes
Ideas are important, but they're not essential. What's essential and important is the execution of the idea. ~ John Landis
A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment. ~ Max Planck
The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes. ~ Nikola Tesla

An idea is a concept or mental impression. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images.

Quotes

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  • Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
    • Howard H. Aiken, as quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater
    • Variant: Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
      • As quoted in A Computer Science Reader: Selections from Abacus (1988) by Eric A. Weiss, p. 404.
  • Man has always been afraid of anything mysterious, forgetting that the key to the mystery is within himself. One must free oneself from all impeding conditions or circumstances, which are different for everyone. Progress depends upon free will that is directed toward good. The power of good compels even machines to act not for themselves, but for humanity. Thus, Our apparatuses function with Our collaboration. People may laugh, but ideas do rule the world. These words are entered into the Statutes of the Brotherhood.
  • Unknown names, unknown places and unfamiliar words often come to the surface from the depths of consciousness. Scientists call this the subconscious, but they are unaware that communications from space accumulate... and when given an impulse, are transferred to the brain... one should pay heed to such flashes of consciousness... In everyday life one should learn to recognize these messages which always come at the right moment. People complain that they are deprived of lofty Guidance, but such a strong statement is unreasonable. We give much, and it is they who perceive little! Therefore, We remind people to pay more heed to words that spring forth suddenly in the conscious mind. Such words should not be dismissed, but should be carefully applied in life. Many other useful ideas come in a flash, like flying butterflies, but people only brush them aside. We never tire of disseminating useful information, and We advise you to treat it with care, for it will be of use in the Subtle World. Thus, one should develop the particular ability to catch the thoughts of space.
  • Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea.
    • Propos sur le Religion no. 74 (1938), under the pen name Alain.
    • Alternate translation: “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it's the only one we have.” IZQuotes (retrieved 10/30/18).
  • It is in this realm of ideas that humanity is not a free agent. . . . Once an idea becomes an ideal, humanity can freely reject or accept it, but ideas come from a higher source and are imposed... whether men want them or not. Upon the use made of these ideas (which are in the nature of divine emanations, embodying the divine plan for planetary progress) will depend the rapidity of humanity's progress, or its retardation for lack of understanding.
  • It’s important not to overstate the benefits of ideas. Quite frankly, I know it’s kind of a romantic notion that you’re just going to have this one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great. But the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of creating something great. It has to be the right idea and have good taste, but the execution and delivery are what’s key.
    • Sergey Brin. Interviewed by Jemima Kiss for The Guardian (UK) newspaper, ‘Secrets of a nimble giant’, Wednesday 17th June 2009.
  • ... the best way to think about investments is to be in a room with no one else and just think. And if that doesn't work — nothing else is going to work. ... what you are looking for is some way to get one good idea a year ... and then ride it to its full potential. ... Wall Street makes its money on activity — you make your money on inactivity.
  • Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas — both false — can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.
  • But arms – instrumentalities, as President Wilson called them – are not sufficient by themselves. We must add to them the power of ideas. People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
  • A man to whom it has been given to bless the world with a great creative idea has no need for the praise of posterity. His very achievement has already conferred a higher boon upon him.
  • A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
    • Albert Einstein, Letter to Dr. H. L. Gordon (May 3, 1949 – AEA 58-217) as quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson.
  • The key to every man is his thought…. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
  • The phrase a Russian intellectual is probably most likely to use when talking about the early 1980s is bezvozdushnoye prostranstvo—“airless space.” The era was stuffy like the Russian izba, a log cabin, when its windows are caulked for the winter: it keeps out the cold, but also the fresh air. The windows will not be opened even a crack until well into spring, and as time goes on, smells of people, food, and clothing mix into one mind-numbing undifferentiated smell of gigantic proportions. Something similar had happened to the Russian mind over two generations of Soviet rule. At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part of and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning. Lenin had long ago dispensed with most of what Karl Marx had to say, enshrining a few of his selected ideas as überlaw.
    • Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, (2017)
  • Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
    • Alfred Whitney Griswold, baccalaureate address, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (9 June 1957) —Congressional Record (11 June 1957), vol. 103, Appendix, p. A4545.
  • Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
  • Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
    • Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish (1990), Chatto Counterblasts
  • The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
  • If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
    • Admiral Grace Hopper, as quoted in Built to Learn: The inside story of how Rockwell Collins became a true learning organization (2003) by Cliff Purington, Chris Butler, and Sarah Fister Gale, p. 171.
  • A person with imprecise ideas can understand little and be of less help to others.
  • If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
  • That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one,
    • Samuel Johnson, in Life of Johnson (Boswell), Volume iii, Chapter v (1770).
    • Compare Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, book 4, chapter 5 (1845):
      • Mr. Kremlin himself was distinguished for ignorance, for he had only one idea,—and that was wrong.
  • The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be for most readers if the author's assault upon them is to be successful,—a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
    • John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Preface, p. viii (1936).
  • The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
    • John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Ch. 24 "Concluding Notes" p. 383-384
  • Plato was right: ideas rule the world, and, as men's minds will receive new ideas, laying aside the old and effete, the world will advance: mighty revolutions will spring from them; creeds and even powers will crumble before their onward march crushed by the irresistible force. It will be just as impossible to resist their influx, when the time comes, as to stay the progress of the tide. But all this will come gradually on, and before it comes we have a duty set before us; that of sweeping away as much as possible the dross left to us by our pious forefathers. New ideas have to be planted on clean places, for these ideas touch upon the most momentous subjects.
  • People don't understand this: Ideas are important, but they're not essential. What's essential and important is the execution of the idea. Everyone has had the experience of seeing a movie and saying, "Hey! That was my idea!" Well, it doesn't mean anything that you had that idea. There's no such thing as an original concept. What's original is the way you re-use ancient concepts.
  • 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.
  • You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!
  • When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
  • The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas. ... The class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it.
  • My goal is making machines that can think—by understanding how people think. One reason why we find this hard to do is because our old ideas about psychology are mostly wrong. Most words we use to describe our minds (like "consciousness," "learning," or "memory") are suitcase-like jumbles of different ideas. Those old ideas were formed long ago, before "computer science" appeared. It was not until the 1950s that we began to develop better ways to help think about complex processes.
  • Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.
  • There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell.
  • 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. We are heading for a radical revision where you could say we are heading towards the end of the world, but more in the R.E.M. sense than the Revelation sense. That is what apocalypse means – revelation. I could square that with the end of the world, a revelation, a new way of looking at things, something that completely radicalises our notions of the where we were, when we were, what we were, something like that would constitute an end to the world in the kind of abstract – yet very real sense – that I am talking about. A change in the language, a change in the thinking, a change in the music. It wouldn’t take much – one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting – who knows – we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger and stranger than they ever were before. They are realised at a greater speed, everything has become very fluid.
  • If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
    • Linus Pauling, as quoted by Francis Crick in his presentation "The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology" (1995).
  • It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.
  • The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.
  • We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another, and, in short, as if they were substantial things; nor can any reasonable objection be raised to such expressions. But taking the word "idea" in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness, it is clear that an idea once past is gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea. These two ideas are not present in the same state of consciousness, and therefore cannot possibly be compared.
    • Charles Sanders Peirce, The Law of Mind (1892), First published in The Monist, Vol. II, No. 4 (July 1892), p. 533.
  • The best of ideas is hurt by uncritical acceptance and thrives on critical examination.
    • George Pólya, How to Solve It (1945), p. 100 in the 2004 edition.
  • New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.
    • Max Planck addressing the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (January 1936), as quoted in Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (1993) ISBN 0-19-507010-0
  • One thing I learnt was never to hoard ideas because either they are not so relevant or they've gone stale. Whatever it is, pour them out.
  • Nothing is as difficult as to achieve results in this world if one is filled full of great tolerance and the milk of human kindness. The person who achieves must generally be a one-ideaed individual, concentrated entirely on that one idea, and ruthless in his aspect toward other men and other ideas.
  • What is important is not the ideas themselves, but the context in which they operate.
  • In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce, in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.
    • Roger Wolcott Sperry, "Mind, Brain and Humanist Values," New Views on the Nature of Man (1965) ed., John R. Platt, pp. 82-83.
  • Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?
    • Often attributed to Stalin, there is not a single source which show that Stalin said this at any given time. There is only one source outside the blogosphere which attributes the quote to Stalin, but does not provide any evidence for the attribution. That source is the book Quotations for Public Speakers: A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology (2001), p. 121 by the USA Ex-senator Robert Torricelli.
  • Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
    • John Steinbeck, Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini.
  • “Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity. … This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
    • Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (1959), p. 73
  • An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
    • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) Preludes, p.3.
  • The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.
    • Nikola Tesla "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)
  • Universal Peace, assuming it to be in the fullest sense realizable, might not require eons for its accomplishment, however probable this may appear, judging from the imperceptibly slow growth of all great reformatory ideas of the past. … Our accepted estimates of the duration of natural metamorphoses, or changes in general, have been thrown in doubt of late. The very foundations of science have been shaken.
  • To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever.
    • Miguel de Unamuno, Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida (The Tragic Sense of Life), V: The Rationalist Dissolution (1913).
  • There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.
    • Miguel de Unamuno, as recalled by Walter Starkie from a conversation he had with Unamuno, as related in the Epilogue of Unamuno.
  • We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I've witnessed first hand the power of ideas. I've seen people kill in the name of them, and die defending them … but you cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it … ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love… And it is not an idea that I miss, it is a man.
  • 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.

See also

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