Quotes About Ideas

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction.  Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

— Walter Lippmann

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against a barrack square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.

— Sean O’Casey

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in the villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

— Theodore H. White

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

— George Francis Fitzgerald

You can’t shoot an idea.

— Thomas E. Dewey

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.  Ideas have endurance without death.

— John F. Kennedy

A young man must let his ideas grow, not be continually rooting them up to see how they are getting on.

— William McFee

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

— Victor Hugo

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; an idea whose time has come.

— Victor Hugo

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

— Oscar Wilde

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.

— William James

All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

— Grant Wood

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

When forty million people believe in a dumb idea, it’s still a dumb idea.

— Ad run by United Technologies Corporation

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.  Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

— Albert Camus