Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 6

“I was convinced — and I am so still — that the fundamental principles of Christianity have to be proved true by reasoning, and by no other method. Reason, I said to myself, is given us that we may bring everything within the range of its action, even the most exalted ideas of religion. And this certainty filled me with joy.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Religion, Joy

“I want to emphasize the necessity for a sound mathematical basis for any fundamental physical theory. Any philosophical ideas that one may have play only a subordinate role. Unless such ideas have a mathematical basis they will be ineffective.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory (1978)

Mathematics

“One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education… The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.”

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day

11 May 1943
My Day (1935–1962)

People, Books, Education, Way

“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

that does not occur to them.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e

People, Pleasure, Thinking

“Here, I'll practice on you. Mom. I have something to tell you. I'm undead. Now, I know you may have some preconceived notions about the undead. I know you may not be comfortable with the idea of me being undead. But I'm here to tell you that the undead are just like you and me. Well, okay. Possibly more like me than you.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Simon to Clary, pg. 218
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Moms

“Sir, your ideas are incorrect in every possible respect.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Madouc (1989), Chapter 7, section 5 (p. 848)

“He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held as sacred to a brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued the base intellectual development which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

p, 125
"Ethan Brand" (1850)

Love, Life, Fear, Star

“So, now the Republicans are going around — this is the kind of thing they do. I don't understand it. They are going around. They're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea, as if this is Barack Obama's energy plan. Now, two points. One, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is. But the other thing is, they are making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 percent to 4 percent. It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant, you know? I mean, they think it's funny that they're making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework, because this is serious business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Responding to Republican criticism of his energy policy (5 August 2008) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0808/05/sitroom.03.html 2008

Guy, Lying, Understanding, Business

“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Section 2, paragraph 64.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“I suspect that those of you who pursue more education, or climb the corporate ladder, or enter the arts or sciences or journalism, will still choose a cause you care about in your life and fight like heck to make it happen.
There is a word for this. It’s citizenship. We don’t always talk about this idea much these days, let alone celebrate it. Sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time – one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition; a society awash in instant technology that empowers us to leverage our skills and talents like never before, but just as easily allows us to retreat from the world. And the result is that we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share, as one American family.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)

Life, World, Education, Family

“Political institutions and ideologies are the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of the man; in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind. We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs, and we torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something. All our experience, spiritual or otherwise, is the basic cause of our suffering… The body is not interested in anything "you" are interested in; that is the battle that is going on all the time.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 7: What Kind Of Human Being Do You Want?

Hope, Way, Thinking, Suffering

“Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10
Minima Moralia (1951)

Marriage, World, Communication, Nature

“People ask me… "What do you still bring from Hawaii? How does it affect your character, how does it affect your politics?" I try to explain to them something about the Aloha Spirit. I try to explain to them this basic idea that we all have obligations to each other, that we're not alone, that if we see somebody who's in need we should help… that we look out for one another, that we deal with each other with courtesy and respect, and most importantly, that when you come from Hawaii, you start understanding that what's on the surface, what people look like — that doesn't determine who they are.
And that the power and strength of diversity, the ability of people from everywhere … whether they're black or white, whether they're Japanese-Americans or Korean-Americans or Filipino-Americans or whatever they are, they are just Americans, that all of us can work together and all of us can join together to create a better country.
And it's that spirit, that I'm absolutely convinced, is what America is looking for right now.
Because we've been divided for so long, we've been arguing for so long, a lot of times about things that aren't even worth arguing about, and ignoring the things that we should be doing to make the next generation have a better life — that I think people are hungry for a new politics, they're hungry for change, and that's why I decided to run for President of the United States.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Speech in Keehi Lagoon Beach Park, Hawaii, (8 August 2008) http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=40384154 2008

Life, People, Understanding, Thinking

“Painting is that pleasant amusement being one of the means whereby we convey ideas to each other.”

Jonathan Richardson (1667–1745) English painter

Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725)

Painting

“But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty. Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i. e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i. e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, (28 December 1846), Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur, Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 38, p. 95; International Publishers (1975). First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol. III, 1912

Life, Men, Truth, World

“Among so many conflicting ideas and so many different perspectives, the honest man is confused and distressed and the skeptic becomes wicked … Since one must take sides, one might as well choose the side that is victorious, the side which devastates, loots, and burns. Considering the alternative, it is better to eat than to be eaten.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Letter to his brother, as quoted in The Age of Napoleon (2002) by J. Christopher Herold, p. 8

Victory

“I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Often paraphrased as “Religion keeps the poor from killing the rich.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Religion

“Ideas do not exist separately from language.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 83.

“Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 14

Behavior, Appearance

“In a nutshell, the idea of Juche means that the masters of the revolution and the work of construction are the masses of the people and that they are also the motive force of the revolution and the work of construction. In other words, one is responsible for one's own destiny and one has also the capacity for hewing out one's own destiny.”

Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Mainichi Shimbun (17 September 1972) "On Some Problems of Our Party's Juche Idea and the Government of the Republic's Internal and External Policies"

People, Motivation

“I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Maps of Meaning

People, Feeling, Freedom, Hurt

“I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 290
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Dispenso-a de comparecer na minha ideia de si.

“You may turn a bad idea into a good idea — don't kill the bad idea prematurely. A bad idea can evolve into a good idea.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

“The issue of press freedom is a constant concern in my interactions with the Chinese government. It’s an issue that I’ve raised with the President here in Burma. I’m pretty blunt and pretty frank about the fact that societies that repress journalists ultimately oppress people as well, and that if you want a society that is free and vibrant and successful, part of that formula is the free flow of information, of ideas, and that requires a free press. […] And we believe that when governments censor or control information, that ultimately that undermines not only the society, but it leads to eventual encroachments on individual rights as well. […] I brought up a basic principle that I stated earlier, which is that a free press is a foundation for any democracy. We rely on journalists to explain and describe the actions of our government. If the government controls the journalists, then it's very difficult for citizens to hold that government accountable.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma in Joint Press Conference at Aung San Suu Kyi Residence in Rangoon, Burma on November 14, 2014 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/14/remarks-president-obama-and-daw-aung-san-suu-kyi-burma-joint-press-confe 2014

People, Democracy, Freedom, Success

“Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book The Queen of Spades

VI.
The Queen of Spades (1833)

World

“I think that it’s important always to retain awareness of what you call core ideas, including those in the tradition of political philosophy. I think keeping in touch with those earlier political philosophers, being aware of them as part of our training, I think that’s still quite worthwhile. I know, or I would guess less and less of that may be taking place. But at the same time, I think that we should try to remain aware of the richness and complexity of the world that we deal with out there, and how much more, in a way—[laughing] it’s always been complex, but how much more complex it’s grown. Especially the field of democracy now, in just the sheer number and varieties.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

A Conversation with Robert A. Dahl (2009)

World, Way, Democracy, Thinking

“Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 258)
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Problem, Thinking, Winter, Painting

“A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an ‘idea’, but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, […] the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: '… Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.' [In poetry, ] the poverty of the ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of the verbal pattern.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

Beauty, Way, Painting

“If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

John D. Barrow, Between Inner and Outer Space: Essays on Science, Art and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-192-88041-1, Part 4, ch. 13: Why is the Universe Mathematical? (p. 88). Also found in Barrow's "The Mathematical Universe" http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/mathematical_universe.htm (1989) and The Artful Universe Expanded (Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-192-80569-X, ch. 5, Player Piano: Hearing by Numbers, p. 250 Misattributed

Religion, Mathematics

“p>To the new International that is now in the irreversible process of preparation we can contribute the ideas of worldwide organization and the world state; the English can suggest the idea of worldwide exploitation and trusts; the French can offer nothing….
Thus we find two great economic principles opposed to each other in the modern world. The Viking has become a free-tradesman; the Teutonic knight is now an administrative official. There can be no reconciliation. Each of these principles is proclaimed by a German people, Faustian men par excellence. Neither can accept a restriction of its will, and neither can be satisfied until the whole world has succumbed to its particular idea. This being the case, war will be waged until one side gains final victory. Is world economy to be worldwide exploitation, or worldwide organization? Are the Caesars of the coming empire to be billionaires or universal administrators? Shall the population of the earth, so long as this empire of Faustian civilization holds together, be subjected to cartels and trusts, or to men such as those envisioned in the closing pages of Goethe’s Faust, Part II? Truly, the destiny of the world is at stake….
This brings us to the political aspects of the English-Prussian antithesis. Politics is the highest and most powerful dimension of all historical existence. World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars. Ideas, when they press for decisions, assume the form of political units: countries, peoples, or parties. They must be fought over not with words but with weapons. Economic warfare becomes military warfare between countries or within countries. Religious associations such as Jewry and Islam, Huguenots and Mormons, constitute themselves as countries when it becomes a matter of their continued existence or their success. Everything that proceeds from the innermost soul to become flesh or fleshly creation demands a sacrifice of flesh in return. Ideas that have become blood demand blood. War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake; they are signs of readiness for war. And even if a tired and blood-drained humanity desired to do away with war, like the citizens of the Classical world during its final centuries, like the Indians and Chinese of today, it would merely exchange its role of war-wager for that of the object about and with which others would wage war. Even if a Faustian universal harmony could be attained, masterful types on the order of late Roman, late Chinese, or late Egyptian Caesars would battle each other for this Empire—for the possession of it, if its final form were capitalistic; or for the highest rank in it, if it should become socialistic.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

Prussianism and Socialism (1919)

Men, War, People, World

“Don’t buy into the idea that women aren’t strong enough to do anything they want on their own.”

Cher (1946) American singer and actress

‘"Cher Genius", You magazine, the Mail on Sunday (UK) newspaper (28 November 2010)

Women, Strong

“How grievously I was disappointed! …I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind and any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person that began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which also have a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I an sitting here in a curved posture… and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia… if they had been guided only by their idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part… to undergo any punishment that the State inflicts.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Disappointment, Thinking, Water, Parting

“You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility, because your rights are my responsibility. That's what they are technically. So, you just can't have only half of that discussion. And we're only having half of that discussion. Then the questions is, 'well what are you leaving out if you're only having that half of the discussion.' And the answer is, 'well, you're leaving out responsibility.' And then the questions is, 'Well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility.' And the answer might be: 'Well maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life.' Here you are, suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights? It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility. That's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. Look at yourself. You're useless. Easily hurt. Easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there. For men, there's nothing but responsibility. Women have their sets of responsibilities. They're not the same. Women have to take primary responsibility for having infants at least, then also for caring for them. They're structured differently than men for biological necessity. Women know what they have to do. Men have to figure out what they have to do. And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan. And why the hell not? The alternative to valued responsibility is low class pleasure. Why lift a load if there's nothing in it for you? And that's what we're doing to men and boys that's a very bad idea. Basically we give them the message, 'you're pathological and oppressive.' They often respond, 'fine then, why the hell should I play? If I get no credit for bearing responsibility, then you can be sure I won't bear any.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self contempt and nihilism, and that's not good. And so that's what I think is going on at a deeper level with regard to men needing this direction. A man has to decide that he's going to do something. He has to decide that."
Concepts

Life, Women, Men, Pleasure

“(On the idea of being offended): “The majority of people are very reasonable I’ve found, but ya know what, they don’t write letters when something offends them on TV, because reasonable people know IT’S JUST FUCKIN’ TELEVISION! Not only that, reasonable people have a life! They’re not sittin’ in some trailer with some fuckin’ crayon in their hand, some chicken scrawl goin’ ‘I saw a guy talk about Jesus on the tube! I ain’t gone tune in no more!’And also reasonable people know ultimately they’re just fuckin’ jokes! Are you so afraid of a guy tellin’ jokes!””

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Relentless (1992)

Life, People, Guy

“The trouble is, Roosevelt hasn't taken all of my ideas; just part of them. I'm about one hundred yards ahead of him. We're on the same road, but I'm here and he's there.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Huey Long (Williams p. 637)

Parting

“They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. Velasquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from what he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velasquez painted…”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Paris 1923
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 312
Quotes, 1920's

People, Art, Way, Nature

“Your favourite virtue … Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man … Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman … Weakness
Your chief characteristic … Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness … To fight
Your idea of misery … Submission
The vice you excuse most … Gullibility
The vice you detest most … Servility
Your aversion … Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation … Book-worming
Favourite poet … Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer … Diderot
Favourite hero … Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine … Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower … Daphne
Favourite colour … Red
Favourite name … Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish … Fish
Favourite maxim … Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me, Terence]
Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Everything must be doubted Marx's replies to a set of questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and Laura in 1865 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htm

Happiness, Books, Flowers, Fish

“The idea is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Bible Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers
Biblical Lectures

“Imagination and obsession are the keys to getting a good idea. To help your imagination keep your eyes and ears open. Avoid the "not invented here prejudice."”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Imagination, Help

“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party nomination (14 September 1960) · Address of John F. Kennedy upon Accepting the Liberal Party Nomination for President https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Liberal-Party-Nomination-NYC_19600914.aspx 1960

People, Health, School, Housing

“One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Men

“If what we are discussing were a point of law or of the humanities, in which neither true nor false exists, one might trust in subtlety of mind and readiness of tongue and in the greater experience of the writers, and expect him who excelled in those things to make his reasoning most plausible, and one might judge it to be the best. But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself. Therefore, Simplicio, give up this idea and this hope of yours that there may be men so much more learned, erudite, and well-read than the rest of us as to be able to make that which is false become true in defiance of nature.”

Galileo Galilei book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Salviati, p. 61
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)

Men, Truth, Law, Hope

“Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Settembrini on the Magic Mountain Society, in Ch. 5
The Magic Mountain (1924)

People

“The steam-engine having furnished us with a means of converting heat into a motive power, and our thoughts being thereby led to regard a certain quantity of work as an equivalent for the amount of heat expended in its production, the idea of establishing theoretically some fixed relation between a quantity of heat and the quantity of work which it can possibly produce, from which relation conclusions regarding the nature of heat itself might be deduced, naturally presents itself. Already, indeed, have many successful efforts been made with this view; I believe, however, that they have not exhausted the subject, but that, on the contrary, it merits the continued attention of physicists… The most important investigation in connexion with this subject is that of S. Carnot.”

Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) German mathematical physicist

First Memoir. On the Moving Force of Heat and the Laws which may be Deduced Therefrom
The Mechanical Theory of Heat (1867)

Motivation, Nature, Effort, Success

“I’ve rejoiced with you and mourned with you, what I have also seen, more than anything, is what is right with America. I see people working hard and starting businesses. I see people teaching kids and serving our country. I see engineers inventing stuff, doctors coming up with new cures. I see a younger generation full of energy and new ideas, not constrained by what is, ready to seize what ought to be.
And most of all, I see Americans of every party, every background, every faith who believe that we are stronger together — black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American; young, old; gay, straight; men, women, folks with disabilities, all pledging allegiance, under the same proud flag, to this big, bold country that we love. That's what I see. That's the America I know!”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, DNC Address (July 2016)

Love, Women, Men, People

“It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur"—although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony—or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do—though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to August Derleth (16 May 1931), responding to Derleth's suggestion that he call the interconnected mythology of his stories (what would later be known as the Cthulhu Mythos) "The Mythology of Hastur", quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 505
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth

Thinking

“As for the general idea of what one would do if certain of death in an hour—I fancy most persons in normal health tend to sentimentalise and romanticise a bit about it. For my part—as a realist beyond the age of theatricalism and naive beliefs—I feel quite certain that my own known last hour would be spent quite prosaically in writing instructions for the disposition of certain books, manuscripts, heirlooms, and other possessions. Such a task would—in view of the mental stress—take at least an hour—and it would be the most useful thing I could do before dropping off into oblivion. If I did finish ahead of time, I'd probably spend the residual minutes getting a last look at something closely associated with my earliest memories—a picture, a library table, an 1895 Farmer's Almanack, a small music-box I used to play with at 2 ½, or some kindred symbol—completing a psychological circle in a spirit half of humour and half of whimsical sentimentality. Then—nothingness, as before Aug. 20, 1890.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to a round-robin letter-writing group called "the Coryciani" (14 July 1936), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 339
Non-Fiction, Letters

Death, Health, Books, Age

“There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through Truth is Good. This is the most profound ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is Truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted Truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If you can confront If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Love, Death, People, Truth

“At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time. This idea was first put forward by Milne, who worked it out on… assumptions… not very satisfying… we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity [that] there is fundamental similarity between space and time.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

The Relation between Mathematics and Physics http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/events/strings02/dirac/speach.html (Feb. 6, 1939) Proceedings of the Royal Society (Edinburgh) Vol. 59, 1938-39, Part II, pp. 122-129.

Law, Beauty, Nature, Change

“Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbles where his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position, but rather chance and luster determine it.
Then we are not called to the position where we can most shine. It is not the one which, in the long succession of years during which we may hold it, will never make us weary, subdue our zeal, or dampen our inspiration. Soon we shall see our wishes unfulfilled and our ideas unsatisfied.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 36
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

Chance, Success

“Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal is to blame. Our teachers, preachers, and politicians have gone too far in advocating the idea that each individual should determine what laws are good and what laws are bad, and that he then should obey the law he likes and disobey the law he dislikes.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1960s, What Has Happened to America? (1967)

Law, Teachers

“Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

Way, Nature, Sense, Time

“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da!— the World Wide Web.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

Answers for Young People http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html

World

“Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 12

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely settled — but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Cask of Amontillado

"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846).

Soul, Revenge, Nature

“Psychology appeared to be a jungle of confusing, conflicting, and arbitrary concepts. These pre-scientific theories doubtless contained insights which still surpass in refinement those depended upon by psychiatrists or psychologists today. But who knows, among the many brilliant ideas offered, which are the true ones? Some will claim that the statements of one theorist are correct, but others will favour the views of another. Then there is no objective way of sorting out the truth except through scientific research.”

Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) British-American psychologist

Source: The Scientific Analysis of Personality, 1965, p. 14 (quote doesn't seem to be present in 1966 edition)

Truth, Way, Appearance, Dependency

“At a very early stage I realised that it's a real problem to perform electronic music on stage because electronic instruments are not particularly convincing on a visual point of view: somebody behind his computer, it's not particularly visual. So I was inspired by the opera. And what was the opera in the 19th century? It was the idea for a musician to join and to work, to collaborate with a stage director, with carpenters, painters, people doing decors, graphic artists to have a visual prolongation, a visual correspondence to their work. That's what I tried to do with the tools of my generation: electronics and video and lights and all that.”

Jean-Michel Jarre (1948) French composer, performer and music producer

interviewed on the Danish Monitor radio programme 2005-11-30

People, Music, Problem, Light

“The idea of the saint is the exact opposite of the priest in service of the Holy. The priest is a functionary of the Holy;' there is no Holy without its officials, without the bureaucratic machinery supporting it, organizing its ritual, from the Aztecs' official of human sacrifice to the modern sacred state or army rituals. The saint on the contrary, occupies the object petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He… enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

130
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Support

“By placing these people with foreign ideas in camps, German blood was saved. Would it have been better to have a civil war?”

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn, May 2, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

War, People

“As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book V

Women, Men, Truth, Faith

“Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery, but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case, I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

After Lord Rayleigh's praise of Tesla at the Royal Institution, London, 1892
My Inventions (1919)

Science, Time

“Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 167-168

Age, Art, Freedom, Time

“The line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object; and this being its nature it occupies no space. Therefore an infinite number of lines may be conceived of as intersecting each other at a point, which has no dimensions and is only of the thickness (if thickness it may be called) of one single line.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), II Linear Perspective

Nature

“Preparatory Men. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

The Gay Science (1882)

Men, War, Age, Way

“Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present. A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

"On Light And Other High Frequency Phenomena" A lecture delivered before the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia (24 February 1893), and before the National Electric Light Association, St. Louis (1 March 1893), published in The Electrical review (9 June 1893), p. Page 683; also in The Inventions, Researches And Writings of Nikola Tesla (1894)

Life, Men, Age, World

“Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Support, Time

“Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ever-widening range of dynamical systems, including the electromagnetic field in interaction with matter. The underlying ideas and the laws governing their application form a simple and elegant scheme, which one would be inclined to think could not be seriously modified without having all its attractive features spout. Nevertheless it has been found possible to set up a new scheme, called quantum mechanics, which is more suitable for the description of phenomena on the atomic scale and which is in some respects more elegant and satisfying than the classical scheme. This possibility is due to the changes which the new scheme involves being of a very profound character and not clashing with the features of the classical theory that make it so attractive, as a result of which all these features can be incorporated in the new scheme.”

Paul Dirac book Principles of Quantum Mechanics

I. The Principle of Superposition - 1. The Need for a Quantum Theory
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (4th ed. 1958)

Law, Thinking, Change, Time

“The lion laying with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are of course that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnal house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life, Way, Reality, Strong

“Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet — whom Plato banned from his Republic — may rise up to save us all.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

War

“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.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Peace, Nature, Sense, Universe

“A kind of music far superior, in my opinion, to that of operas, and which in all Italy has not its equal, nor perhaps in the whole world, is that of the 'scuole'. The 'scuole' are houses of charity, established for the education of young girls without fortune, to whom the republic afterwards gives a portion either in marriage or for the cloister. Amongst talents cultivated in these young girls, music is in the first rank. Every Sunday at the church of each of the four 'scuole', during vespers, motettos or anthems with full choruses, accompanied by a great orchestra, and composed and directed by the best masters in Italy, are sung in the galleries by girls only; not one of whom is more than twenty years of age. I have not an idea of anything so voluptuous and affecting as this music; the richness of the art, the exquisite taste of the vocal part, the excellence of the voices, the justness of the execution, everything in these delightful concerts concurs to produce an impression which certainly is not the mode, but from which I am of opinion no heart is secure. Carrio and I never failed being present at these vespers of the 'Mendicanti', and we were not alone. The church was always full of the lovers of the art, and even the actors of the opera came there to form their tastes after these excellent models. What vexed me was the iron grate, which suffered nothing to escape but sounds, and concealed from me the angels of which they were worthy. I talked of nothing else. One day I spoke of it at Le Blond's; "If you are so desirous," said he, "to see those little girls, it will be an easy matter to satisfy your wishes. I am one of the administrators of the house, I will give you a collation [light meal] with them." I did not let him rest until he had fulfilled his promise. In entering the saloon, which contained these beauties I so much sighed to see, I felt a trembling of love which I had never before experienced. M. le Blond presented to me one after the other, these celebrated female singers, of whom the names and voices were all with which I was acquainted. Come, Sophia, — she was horrid. Come, Cattina, — she had but one eye. Come, Bettina, — the small-pox had entirely disfigured her. Scarcely one of them was without some striking defect.
Le Blond laughed at my surprise; however, two or three of them appeared tolerable; these never sung but in the choruses; I was almost in despair. During the collation we endeavored to excite them, and they soon became enlivened; ugliness does not exclude the graces, and I found they possessed them. I said to myself, they cannot sing in this manner without intelligence and sensibility, they must have both; in fine, my manner of seeing them changed to such a degree that I left the house almost in love with each of these ugly faces. I had scarcely courage enough to return to vespers. But after having seen the girls, the danger was lessened. I still found their singing delightful; and their voices so much embellished their persons that, in spite of my eyes, I obstinately continued to think them beautiful.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), On the musicians of the Ospedale della Pieta (book VII)

Love, Marriage, Age, World

“This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas.”

Edward Bernays (1891–1995) American public relations consultant, marketing pioneer

"Manipulating Public Opinion", American Journal of Sociology 33 (May, 1928), p. 958–971

Age

“During my youth I rather leaned toward the prognosis that the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear, as it were, automatically. The historical development of the last quarter of a century has not confirmed this view. Decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an intensified nationalism, one aspect of which is anti-Semitism. The Jewish question has loomed largest in the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, Germany. […]
The Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument adapted to modern culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come. […]
We must bear in mind that the Jewish people will exist a long time. The nation cannot normally exist without common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more tragic and more and more menacing character. I do not at all believe that the Jewish question can be resolved within the framework of rotting capitalism and under the control of British imperialism. […]
Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded, by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities. The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of the planned economy. This is the great historic perspective as I see it. To work for international Socialism means to work also for the solution of the Jewish question.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Excerpts of Trotsky’s interview with Jewish Telegraphic Agency (18 January 1937); as quoted in Trotsky and the Jews (1972) by Joseph Nedava, p. 204

People, Youth, Spring, Communication

“Getting every employee's mind into the game is a huge part of what a CEO job is all about. Taking everyone's best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. There's nothing more important.”

Jack Welch (1935) American executive: General Electric CEO

Source: Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001), Ch. 24.

Secret, Game, Parting

“Let us assume that our problem is the intensification in the public mind of the prestige of a hotel. The problem for the public relations counsel is to create in the public mind the close relationship between the hotel and a number of ideas that represent the things the hotel desires to stand for in the public mind.”

Edward Bernays (1891–1995) American public relations consultant, marketing pioneer

Source: Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), p. 168

Problem

“In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866.
Das Kapital (Buch III) (1894)

“The human race is trying to work out: 'well, what's the ultimate sacrifice?' It's something like that. The ultimate sacrifice of value. Well, the Passion story - and I told you was foreshadowing - is that there is a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the Mother, and there's a supreme sacrifice demanded on the part of the Father, all at the same time. That makes the supreme sacrifice possible. And hypothetically, that's the one that renews. That's the sacrifice that renews and redeems. It's a hell of an idea, man. And the things about it is: I don't know if it's true. But I know that its opposite is false. And generally the opposite of something that's false is true. If the mother doesn't make the sacrifice, then you get the horrible Oedipal situation in the household, which is its own catastrophic hell. If the maternal sacrifice isn't there, then that doesn't work. If the paternal sacrifice isn't there - if the father isn't willing to put his son out into the world, then that's a non-starter because the kid doesn't grow up. And if the son isn't willing to do that, then who the hell is going to shoulder the responsibility. So if those three things don't happen, it's chaos, it's cataclysmic, it's hell. If they do happen, is it the opposite of that? Well, maybe you could say it depends on the degree to which they happen. And it's a continuum. How thoroughly can they happen? Well, we don't know, because you might say, 'How good of a job do you do of encouraging your children to live in truth?”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Well, that's part of the answer to this question. And the answer likely is: well, you don't do as good a job of it as you could. So it works out quite well, but you don't know how well it could work if you did it really well, or spectacularly well, or ultimately well or something like that. You don't know."
Bible Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers
Concepts

Children, Truth, World, Hell

“America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try. I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America. And together with your help and God's grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Re-election Speech (November 2012)

Love, God, World, Future

“To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (30 May 1902); also in Mark Twain : A Life, p. 611

“Love at first sight? I absolutely believe in it! You`ve got to keep the faith. Who doesn`t like the idea that you could see someone tomorrow and she could be the love of your life? It`s very romantic.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

Love, Life, Faith

“As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "What is the use of that?"”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book III

Pain, People, Age, Understanding

“Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx — first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy."”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

In a 1960 letter to the GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon, quoted in Matthew Dallek's The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (2000), p. 38
1960s

Age, Way, Imagination

“For every good idea, expect to have five, ten, twenty wrong or useless ideas. You cannot avoid the bad ideas if you keep your imagination free. There is no spam filter for bad ideas.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Imagination

“No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day (1919), Ch. 24

People, Way, Literature, Birth

“My objection to Liberalism is this—that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind—namely, politics—of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/jun/05/expulsion-of-the-british-ambassador-from in the House of Commons (5 June 1848).

Life, Business

“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Attributed in Lincoln the Lawyer (1906) by Frederick Trevor Hill — Hill noted that he could find no record of whom Lincoln was insulting.
Posthumous attributions

“We were peers, I think. Leo's an incredibly intelligent guy who's been through a great amount of life experience over the course of the last few years. He's very dedicated and I think he had a very good idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

Tom Hanks speaking on the working relationship he has with Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of Catch Me If You Can http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/01/16/tom_hanks_catch_me_if_you_can_interview.shtml
About

Life, Guy, Intelligence, Thinking

“I know you didn't do this for me. You did this—you did this because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Iowa Caucus Victory Speech, Delivered at the Iowa Democratic caucus on 3 January 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZaq-YKCnE 2008

Love, People, Change, Country

“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 (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Address on 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

World, Spring, Communication, Problem

“The Author of the piece, is entitled to much credit for the goodness of his Pen: and I could wish he had as much credit for the rectitude of his Heart — for, as Men see thro’ different Optics, and are induced by the reflecting faculties of the Mind, to use different means to attain the same end; the Author of the Address, should have had more charity, than to mark for Suspicion, the Man who should recommend Moderation and longer forbearance — or, in other words, who should not think as he thinks, and act as he advises. But he had another plan in view, in which candor and liberality of Sentiment, regard to justice, and love of Country, have no part; and he was right, to insinuate the darkest suspicion, to effect the blackest designs.
That the Address is drawn with great art, and is designed to answer the most insidious purposes. That it is calculated to impress the Mind, with an idea of premeditated injustice in the Sovereign power of the United States, and rouse all those resentments which must unavoidably flow from such a belief. That the secret Mover of this Scheme (whoever he may be) intended to take advantage of the passions, while they were warmed by the recollection of past distresses, without giving time for cool, deliberative thinking, & that composure of Mind which is so necessary to give dignity & stability to measures, is rendered too obvious, by the mode of conducting the business, to need other proof than a reference to the proceeding.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

1780s, The Newburgh Address (1783)

Love, Men, Secret, Justice

“In my opinion the religion that makes men rebel and fight against their government is not the genuine article, nor is the religion the right sort which reconciles them to the idea of eating their bread in the sweat of other men's faces. It is not the kind to get to heaven on.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

As quoted in Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 https://archive.org/details/recollectionsab00lamogoog (1895), by Ward Hill Lamon, p. 90 1860s

Men, Religion, Fight

“If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

The Wicked Womb (p. 57)
The Female Eunuch (1970)

Way, Thinking, Baby

“This is Nietzsche’s twofold struggle: against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticizing things in the name of established values (the “philosophical labourers”, Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211); but also against those who criticise or respect values by deriving them from simple facts, from so-called “objective facts” (the utilitarians, the “scholars”, BGE Part 6). In both cases philosophy moves in the indifferent element of the valuable in itself or the valuable for all. Nietzsche attacks both the “high” idea of foundation which leaves values indifferent to their origin and the idea of simple causal derivation or smooth beginning which suggests an indifferent origin for values. Nietzsche substitutes the pathos of difference or distance (the differential element) for both the Kantian principle of universality and the principle of resemblance dear to the utilitarians. “It was from the height of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for them; what did utility matter?””

Gilles Deleuze book Nietzsche and Philosophy

GM I 2 p. 26
Source: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), p. 2

Universe, Parting, Indifference

“The idea of any social obligation […] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A ideia de uma obrigação social qualquer [...] só essa ideia me estorva os pensamentos de um dia, e às vezes é desde a mesma véspera que me preocupo, e durmo mal, e o caso real, quando se dá, é absolutamente insignificante, não justifica nada; e o caso repete-se e eu não aprendo a aprender.

Sleep, Learning

“I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Evil, Personality

“If by "democracy" we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world‑ improvers' and freedom‑ teachers' desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number—expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage—is just as much a class‑ ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. … There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money—and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Source: Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 401–02 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.49906/page/n893/mode/2up Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Welthistorische Perspektiven (1922) The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Life, Money, World, Democracy

“I am in a very black mood and profoundly disgusted with painting. It really is a continual torture! Don't expect to see anything new, the little I did manage to do has been destroyed, scraped off, or torn up. You've no idea what appalling weather we've had continuously these two past months. When you're trying to convey the weather, the atmosphere and the general mood, it's enough to make you mad with rage.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote from Monet's letter to art-critic and his friend Gustave Geffroy, Giverny 1890; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 56
1890 - 1900

Mood, Rage, Past, Painting

“When we assume God to be a guiding principle—well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40

Love, God

“But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with "the interests" seemed necessary corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.
By playing upon a old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass group emotions.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Page 74
Propaganda (1928)

People, Thinking, Personality

Quotes about ideas and thoughts page 6

Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 6