
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a good idea.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
Propos sur le Religion no. 74 (1938), under the pen name Alain.
Alternate translation: “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it's the only one we have.” IZQuotes https://izquotes.com/quote/%C3%A9mile-chartier/nothing-is-more-dangerous-than-an-idea-when-you-have-only-one-idea-390165 (retrieved 10/30/18).
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a good idea.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
“Nothing dies harder than a bad idea. And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art.”
The Artist's Way (1992), p. xxv
Daniel T. Gilbert (2007) in: John Brockman. What is your dangerous idea?: today's leading thinkers on the unthinkable. Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 42
“There is nothing more corrosive to a democracy than the idea that there is no truth.”
Open Letter to the Committee Hearing Re: FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers
Letter From Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. James Madison, 19 July 1788
1780s
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Often attributed to Hugo as a paraphrase of a similar idea in his Histore d'un Crime (1877): "One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas", the wording of this famous statement actually more closely resembles a passage from the relatively obscure Les Francs-Tireurs (1861) by Gustave Aimard, p. 68 https://books.google.com/books/about/Les_francs_tireurs.html?id=mKI4AQAAIAAJ:
Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée.
There is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck.
Translated into English as The Freebooters : A Story of the Texan War (1861) https://archive.org/details/freebootersstory00aima, p. 57, Ward & Lock edition
Misattributed
Variant: More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.