To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.
I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice – anything just to get a paper bag. And I’d write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we’re all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.
There are many selfish people who are extremely original, then they take those pure ideas and use them to raise themselves up, that is an insincere move.
You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they’re afraid to be punished if they don’t. For startups, there’s so much pivoting that’s required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you’re in bad shape.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.
I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I’ll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
One problem with ideas, however valid, is that they are static and impersonal, whereas a person is active and dynamic.
I remember I wanted to be Zorro, but I also wanted to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I obviously had ideas above my station.
When the culture of police departments is sometimes infused with bias or preconceived ideas against certain groups, there needs to be reform and retraining throughout. And unfortunately, we cannot rely on local departments to police themselves; we need intervention from the top.
Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.
The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
All organizations start with a structure that looks like a dynamic solar system. They can be very fast, agile. They attract people who play around with crazy ideas.
Just getting a degree is not enough, and you need to sell your ideas.
In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful.
When you hit a groove, it’s not you; it’s the spirit world. The spirits whisper the ideas in your brain and prod you along. They’re the ones that are really happy.
Businesses are not just local or even national anymore – good ideas are immediately global. So the market opportunities are much larger than we’ve ever imagined or seen.
I’ve found that many of the greatest ideas surface in bars because that’s where many people cultivate inspiration.
Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.
Every year that I go out on tour, I think about all the craziest ideas that would be great to go out with, and I think, ‘I should see if Jeff Beck wants to join my band for a month or something.’
Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.
The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, ‘I don’t know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?’ I realized then that we’re all in the same boat. What does anybody know?
An important part of dating is communicating. We communicate by sharing our thoughts, ideas, and feelings. We enjoy being with someone when we have an easy time communicating or when we have a lot to talk about.
I have a notebook that is filled to the brim with my dreams and ideas and goals and aspirations.
A lot of my creative ideas begin in the pub, talking through possibilities with collaborators.
Many, indeed most, inhabitants of the Third World, don’t necessarily share our ideas and beliefs; others pay lip service, but don’t really comprehend them. There are exceptions of course, but most people are not exceptional.
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.
We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten or a hundred or even a thousand! It’s the profound result when two or more respectful human beings determine to go beyond their preconceived ideas to meet a great challenge.
I just work a lot. I just remember recording in a hotel room in Malaysia. I work on planes, I work on buses. A lot of times when I’m backstage in the hotel or on the bus, I would have new ideas.
Attraction is beyond our will or ideas sometimes.
Sometimes it’s the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.
To be honest, it was slavery. Nobody should have any romantic ideas about working underground. It’s very, very dangerous. You always knew you were living in danger. You were on your hands and knees half the day.
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
I am much more interested in defending my ideas than defending my identities.
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I’m always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.
As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.
I don’t know that it’s particularly good for my writing process, but I have gotten some very valuable writing ideas and advice through Twitter and Facebook and other social network sites.
When we were talking about this, an idea for this master vigilante, it was an urban guerilla. One of my ideas was that he would be a member of the police force who turned on the government.
It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.
In an emergency, you rarely get one consistent piece of advice. You usually have two or three people with two or three different ideas. So you want to have your own set of thoughts.
Ideas do not always come in a flash but by diligent trial-and-error experiments that take time and thought.
Having too many ideas is not always a good thing.
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.
Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.
Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
I think he’s informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven’t the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed.
I am convinced that great ideas that are powerfully presented can change a mind in five minutes.
Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity.
