ideas

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.

MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable . . . Commonly Saxon - that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.

MALTHUSIAN, adj. Pertaining to Malthus and his doctrines, who believed in artificially limiting population, but found that it could not be done by talking. Herod of Judea, all the famous soldiers have been practical exponents of the Malthusian idea.

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.