Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Stuart Mill

The idea is essentially repulsive, of a society held together only by the relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interest.

John Stuart Mill

... All ideas need to be heard, because each idea contains one aspect of the truth. By examining that aspect, we add to our own idea of the truth. Even ideas that have no truth in them whatsoever are useful because by disproving them, we add support to our own ideas.

John Sheridan

And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea.

John Ralston Saul

There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.

James Joseph Sylvester

What a glorious title, Nature, a veritable stroke of genius to have hit upon. It is more than a cosmos, more than a universe. It includes the seen as well as the unseen, the possible as well as the actual, Nature and Nature's God, mind and matter. I am lost in admiration of the effulgent blaze of ideas it calls forth.

James Joseph Sylvester

Number, place, and combination . . . the three intersecting but distinct spheres of thought to which all mathematical ideas admit of being referred.

James Joseph Sylvester

A mathematical idea should not be petrified in a formalised axiomatic setting, but should be considered instead as flowing as a river.

James Hutton

Time, which measures everything in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing; it cannot limit that by which alone it had existence; and as the natural course of time, which to us seems infinite, cannot be bounded by any operation that may have an end, the progress of things upon this globe, that is, the course of nature, cannot be limited by time, which must proceed in a continual succession.

James Howard Kunstler

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.

James Scott

Great ideas are fish in a stream. Your pen/pencil is a spear. If you don't spear them, they'll swim on by. Be ready.

James Russell Lowell

All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.

James Gunn

It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.

James Gunn

One should be willing to throw away a dozen ideas to come up with a good one, just as one should throw away a dozen words to come up with the right one.

Laurence Sterne

You can't make theater happen without actors. The actor is the central ingredient in making theater happen. Audiences may come to theaters to see the work of stage managers, directors and producers, but the only people who can communicate theater magic to audiences, through ideas and emotions, are the actors. They are the only ones who can communicate this by themselves, and if necessary, they can get along without you. But you can't make theater without the actor.

Larry Flynt

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

Lal Bahadur Shastri

The basic idea of governance, as I see it, is to hold the society together so that it can develop and march towards certain goals.

Kyan Douglas

I'm no interior decorator, but just I have a feeling that plastic plants in the bathroom... probably not a good idea.

Kyle MacLachlan

To quote Agent Cooper, 'I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.'

Liana Liberato

I like the idea of having a little bit of a mystery about me.

Friedrich Engels

Ideas often kindle each other, like electrical sparks.

Friedrich August von Hayek

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.

Friedrich August von Hayek

The idea that human kind can shape the world according to wish is what I call the fatal conceit

Friedrich Schiller

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes.

Friedrich Schiller

Regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea which follows it; perhaps, in a certain collocation with other ideas, which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.

Frederick W. Smith

My innovation involved taking an idea from the telecommunications and banking industries, and applying that idea to transportation business.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

New ideas can be good and bad, just the same as old ones.

George Gershwin

Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas.

George Gershwin

Originality is the only thing that counts. But the originator uses material and ideas that occur round him and pass through him. And out of his experience comes the original creation.

Jon M. Chu

When I'm doing something, it's something that I had a perspective on in my childhood, or now, but it may be different. I always can go back to what I love, but if somebody has a better idea, then I'm all for it.

Jon M. Chu

The thing that keeps me interested is that I love stories. I love going to movies and I love watching stuff that sparks ideas in my brain.

Jon Ronson

It's not a good idea to define the boundaries of normality by tearing apart people who are outside of it.

Jon Meacham

Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt - an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there's a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it's really, really hard, and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard.

Jojo Moyes

All that counts is the truth. Without it you're basically just juggling people's daft ideas.