Quotes about ideas and thoughts
page 65

Fritz Sauckel photo
Alfred Rosenberg photo

“A party philosopher who was interested in historical research and had no idea of the violence which his philosophy was inciting in the twentieth century.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

Robert H. Jackson [citation needed]

Robert Spencer photo

“Most local imams in Dagestan shun radical views, but they have found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State. Some imams who spoke against radical Islam have been killed.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Why have they “found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State”? To Western leaders such as David Cameron, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Pope Francis, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and a host of others, it is patently obvious that the Qur’an teaches peace and that Islam is a religion of peace. So it ought to be child’s play for these imams in Dagestan to refute the twisted, hijacked version of Islam presented by the Islamic State. Here’s an idea: why doesn’t Barack Obama send Kerry to Dagestan to explain to young Muslims how the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misrepresenting Islam? Or maybe Pope Francis could go there, or he could send some Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic bishop — say, one who knows that Islam is at its core a peaceful religion and who moves actively to silence and ostracize those who say otherwise — to the Islamic State, straight to Raqqa, to explain to the caliph how he is misunderstanding Islam. That would clear up this problem in a hurry. I volunteer to pay the bishop’s airfare.
Jihad Watch - Islamic State on recruitment spree in Russia, “moderate” imams can’t counter the jihadis’ appeal http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/10/islamic-state-on-recruitment-spree-in-russia-moderate-imams-cant-counter-the-jihadis-appeal (29 October 2015)

Antonin Artaud photo
Thomas Merton photo

“This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction… The things on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love. Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts. I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all. I have no idea what I am going to say. I am going to be silent a minute, and then I will say something…”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

'O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.'
Closing statements and prayer from an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975); quoted in Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master : The Essential Writings (1992), p. 237.

Guy Debord photo
Russell Brand photo

“When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel. I am confident that this is necessary. When do you ever meet people that are happy? Genuinely happy? Only children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters. My belief is that it is possible to feel happier, because I feel better than I used to. I am beginning to understand where the solution lies, primarily because of an exhausting process of trial and mostly error. My qualification to write a book on how to change yourself and change the world is not that I’m better than you, it’s that I’m worse. Not that I’m smarter, but that I’m dumber: I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. My only quality has been an unwitting momentum, a willingness to wade through the static dissatisfaction that has been piped into my mind from the moment I learned language. What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it isn’t internally engineered but the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind? Who is it in here, inside your mind, reading these words, feeling that fear? Is there an awareness, an exempt presence, gleaming behind the waterfall of words that commentate on every event, label every object, judge everyone you come into contact with? And is there another way to feel? Is it possible to be in this world and feel another way? Can you conceive, even for a moment, of a species similar to us but a little more evolved, that have transcended the idea that solutions to the way we feel can be externally acquired? What would that look like? How would that feel—to be liberated from the bureaucracy of managing your recalcitrant mind. Is it possible that there is a conspiracy to make us feel this way?”

Revolution (2014)

Oswald Mosley photo
James Frazer photo
John Marshall photo
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“I think that Mr Rajaratnam has left an imprint on the Foreign Service of Singapore that it is a foreign policy of ideas.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

Professor Chan Heng Chee, Singapore Ambassador to the United States.

Colin Wilson photo

“Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.
Source: The Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), p. 158

John Mayer photo

“I was astonished at how well he played live. I had no idea he was that good.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Eric Clapton, on seeing Mayer perform at the Crossroads Music Festival in 2004. (2005) ( From Cleaveland.com http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/friday/1128072649185000.xml&coll=2)

Koichi Tohei photo
Alan Moore photo
George MacDonald photo
John Nash photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Lin Yutang photo
Richard Feynman photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“The idea of death was utterly incongruous—as it is to all men until the final second.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Maelstrom II, p. 789
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

Ethan Allen photo
Ethan Allen photo
Ethan Allen photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Abdullah Öcalan photo
Abdullah Öcalan photo
Will Durant photo

“By mind I mean the totality of perceptions, memories and ideas in an organism.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 6 : Our Souls

Will Durant photo

“A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 4 : On Old Age

Steve Jobs photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, occasionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature - the word "unnatural."”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being blamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues.
Source: On Nature (1874), p. 102

Thurgood Marshall photo
Rudyard Kipling photo
Tracey Thorn photo
Audre Lorde photo
Gregory Benford photo

“A rich bank account did not mean rich ideas; in fact, often the reverse. The bigger your ass, the more you want to cover it.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Stars (2013), p. 338

Elizabeth Warren photo
Steve Jobs photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo

“What lies behind the complaint about the dearth of civil courage? In recent years we have seen a great deal of bravery and self-sacrifice, but civil courage hardly anywhere, even among ourselves. To attribute this simply to personal cowardice would be too facile a psychology; its background is quite different. In a long history, we Germans have had to learn the need for and the strength of obedience. In the subordination of all personal wishes and ideas to the tasks to which we have been called, we have seen the meaning and greatness of our lives. We have looked upwards, not in servile fear, but in free trust, seeing in our tasks a call, and in our call a vocation. This readiness to follow a command from "above" rather than our own private opinions and wishes was a sign of legitimate self-distrust. Who would deny that in obedience, in their task and calling, the Germans have again and again shown the utmost bravery and self-sacrifice? But the German has kept his freedom — and what nation has talked more passionately of freedom than the Germans, from Luther to the idealist philosophers?”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

by seeking deliverance from self-will through service to the community. Calling and freedom were to him two sides of the same thing. But in this he misjudged the world; he did not realize that his submissiveness and self-sacrifice could be exploited for evil ends. When that happened, the exercise of the calling itself became questionable, and all the moral principles of the German were bound to totter. The fact could not be escaped that the Germans still lacked something fundamental: he could not see the need for free and responsible action, even in opposition to the task and his calling; in its place there appeared on the one hand an irresponsible lack of scruple, and on the other a self-tormenting punctiliousness that never led to action. Civil courage, in fact, can grow only out of the free responsibility of free men. Only now are the Germans beginning to discover the meaning of free responsibility. It depends on a God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture.
Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), Civil Courage, p. 5

Bernie Sanders photo

“Occasionally, it might be a good idea to be honest about American foreign policy.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

South Carolina democratic debate (25 February 2020), as quoted in CNN https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/2020-democratic-debate-south-carolina/h_2a3e527ba81bbe6e29e555687c031939
2010s, 2020

Steven Crowder photo
Joseph Goebbels photo
Lewis Gompertz photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“To an atheist […], there is no all-seeing all-loving god to keep us free from harm. But atheism is not a recipe for despair. I think the opposite. By disclaiming the idea of the next life, we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism is life-affirming, in a way religion can never be. Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question. Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "There must be more than just this world, than just this life."”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

But how much more do you want? We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.
End of the part 2: "The Virus of Faith" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMUG6qd98wc
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Jacinda Ardern photo
Benito Mussolini photo

“How can the idea of a creator be reconciled with the existence of dwarfed and atrophied organs, with anomalies and monstrosities, with the existence of pain, perpetual and universal, with the struggle and the inequalities among human beings?”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
Robert Skidelsky photo

“To understand the crisis we need to get beyond the blame game. For at the root of the crisis was not failures of character or competence, but a failure of ideas.”

Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author

Source: John Maynard Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009), Ch. 1 : What Went Wrong?

Nalo Hopkinson photo

“…Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.””

Nalo Hopkinson (1960) Jamaican Canadian writer

And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.
On race still being a taboo topic in the world of science fiction in “Interview: Nalo Hopkinson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-nalo-hopkinson/ in Lightspeed (June 2013)

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge photo

“I was just talking with friends and they said it was good idea and I just sort of liked the idea.”

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (1982) a member of the British royal family

AP via CBS News https://web.archive.org/web/20150906180820/https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prince-faces-press/
Associated Press interview during his gap year (29 September 2000)

Adam Schiff photo

“There is nothing more corrosive to a democracy than the idea that there is no truth.”

Adam Schiff (1960) American politician

Open Letter to the Committee Hearing Re: FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers

Leslie Lamport photo

“I think in other things that I've done, I can look back and see: "This idea developed from something else."”

Leslie Lamport (1941) American computer scientist

Sometimes it would lead back to a previous idea of mine, very often it would lead to something somebody else had done. But the Bakery algorithm just seemed to come out of thin air to me. There was nothing like it that preceded it, so perhaps that's why I'm proudest of it.

As quoted in [Dahlia Malkhi, Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport, https://books.google.com/books?id=z_m2DwAAQBAJ, 16 September 2019, Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 978-1-4503-7273-2, 137]

Victor Hugo photo
Philip K. Dick photo
David Hilbert photo
Alexander Calder photo
Alexander Calder photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“For some reason we have a certain chemistry — or whatever. Let's see what happens. We have a long way to go. But I'm in no rush... So, I just want to say that we are going to be heading out to the DMZ and it's something I planned long ago but had the idea yesterday to maybe say hello, just shake hands quickly and say hello.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

press conference, Blue House, Seoul, South Korea, quoted in * 2019-06-30

Trump: Kim and I "have a certain chemistry"

CNN

https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-dmz-kim-live-intl-hnk/h_8b23e071903b007d8ff1934be8457d2c
2010s, 2019, June

Marilu Henner photo

“For years, I was the girl whose idea of a gourmet meal was a pot of cheese fondue followed by cheesecake. I would think nothing of spending three days chipping away at a pound of Jarlsberg, eating no other food, and proudly calling it my “1,700-Calories-a-Day Diet!””

Marilu Henner (1952) American actress

[…] I knew my health needed improving, so I started making changes. But nothing had quite the impact on my health like giving up cheese. In fact, I consider the day I gave up cheese forever—Wednesday, August 15, 1979—my true health birthday. […] When I gave up dairy, everything about me changed. My skin cleared, my cheeks de-puffed, my nose narrowed, my eyes brightened, my body streamlined.

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=TKfbDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT6 to The Cheese Trap by Neal D. Barnard (2017).

John Allen Paulos photo

“It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that religion and science are growing together and are no longer incompatible. This convergence is, in my opinion, illusory. In fact, I don’t believe that any attempt to combine these very disparate bodies of ideas can succeed intellectually.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 2 “Four Subjective Arguments”, Chapter 5 “The Argument from Interventions (and Miracles, Prayers, and Witnesses)” (pp. 88-89)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

Don Lee (author) photo

“I feel queasy about the idea of having non-Asians taking center stage in one of my books. I would feel guilty about it, as if I were trying to deny my ethnic heritage, even though this is precisely what I am suggesting we should be free to do.”

Don Lee (author) (1959) American writer

On the writing dilemmas that he faces in “Don Lee: The Ethnic Literature Box” https://www.guernicamag.com/don-lee-the-ethnic-literature-box/ in Guernica Magazine (2012 Jun 25)

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“I was left with a great idea gutted by critical examination. But that's good. That's how we make ideas better—by trying to poke holes in them and then finding ways to fix the holes.”

Greg Craven American teacher and writer

Source: What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate (2009), Chapter 1 "The Decision Grid" (p. 31)

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“All over the world, children and young people are being exposed, via the communications revolution, to such ideas. They are not limited to the parochial beliefs of a single culture.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn, p. 321

Céline Sciamma photo

“The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one.”

Céline Sciamma (1978) French director and screenwriter

On her creative process for Portrait of a Lady on Fire in “‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Filmmaker Céline Sciamma Is Trying to Break Your Heart” https://www.indiewire.com/2019/12/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-filmmaker-celine-sciamma-interview-1202193537/ in IndieWire (2019 Dec 05)

“My students have described this process of testing ideas in science as: “Hit it with a sledgehammer and see if it breaks. Whatever survives is the best we've got."”

Greg Craven American teacher and writer

Science is a very adversarial activity! Hence the old adage among physicists: Physics is a contact sport.

Chapter 2 "The Nature of Science" (p. 43)
What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate (2009)

Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner photo
Thomas Edison photo

“We really haven't got any great amount of data on the subject, and without data how can we reach any definite conclusions? All we have — everything — favors the idea of what religionists call the "Hereafter."”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Science, if it ever learns the facts, probably will find another more definitely descriptive term.

As quoted in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295
1930s

Anna J. Cooper photo
Anna J. Cooper photo
Daniel Hannan photo
Daniel Hannan photo

“When I was starting in the game industry, it wasn't uncommon to be the only woman on the entire team...I always felt welcome and I never felt awkward. In my years at Nintendo, I have come to discover that when there are women in a variety of roles on the project, you get a wider [range] of ideas.”

Aya Kyogoku (1981) Video game director

March 19, 2014 Animal Crossing: New Leaf director says team diversity, communication core to its success https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/19/5526678/animal-crossing-new-leaf-diversity-aya-kyogoku

Peter Hotez photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“Most of our British Muslim population is Pakistani. If that population was Indonesian or Tunisian the situation would not be the same. Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"FANATICS OF LONDON" http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/06/hitchensqanda200706/, by Walter Owen, "Vanity Fair", (06/02/2007)
2000s, 2007

Richard D. Wolff photo
William Cobbett photo
Robert Spencer photo

“Islamic apologists in the West argue furiously that child marriage has nothing to do with Islam, and that the idea that Muhammad married a child is the invention of greasy Islamophobes. In reality, few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage.”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Frontpage Mag - Hamas-linked CAIR Rep. Arrested for Pedophilia http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/258279/hamas-linked-cair-rep-arrested-pedophilia-robert-spencer (10 June 2015)
2010s

Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Wendell Berry photo
Fred Hoyle photo
Benjamin Creme photo