Quotation.Cloud - A repository of notable quotations from across time and space

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

 - Linus Pauling

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

 - Eleanor Roosevelt

There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

 - Susan Cain

The invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!

 - Douglas Adams

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.

 - Carl Rogers

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

 - Neil Gaiman

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

 - John Steinbeck

A man, to succeed, must possess the necessary equanimity of temperament to conceive an idea, the capacity to form it into some tangible shape, the ingenuity to put it into practical operation, the ability to favorably impress others with its merits, and the power of will that is absolutely necessary to force it to success.

 - Thomas Scott

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.

 - Corrin Roosevelt

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damn-fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? -- The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

 - Salman Rushdie

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.

 - Oliver Wendell Holmes

If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.

 - John Kemeny

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

 - Carl Sagan

Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.

 - Ron Paul

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

 - Dale Carnegie