“It was a very bad idea. It was a terrible idea. It was the worst idea he had ever heard. It was irresistible.”

“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.”

“If the national park idea is the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.”

“Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.”

“Bad ideas in computer science and anywhere are sticky. If the first idea was a bad idea, then because it works people will sort of repeat it.”

“Socialism is a bad idea because it is naïve about power, which is the worst thing to be naïve about in politics.”

“It's alright to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.”

“The very idea of putting a preacher on trial for what he preaches, the very idea, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

“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.”

“It's not that I don't know that it's a bad idea. It's that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me.”