This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We see facts with our eyes; we see ideas with our minds; we see ideals with our souls. Whatever we see with our souls is real and permanent and cannot be destroyed." - Glenn Clark
"The release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas." - Harry S. Truman
"We need not fear the expression of ideas-we do need to fear their suppression." - Harry S. Truman
"The greatest ideas seem meager enough when they have passed through the sieve of petty minds." - Henri de Lubac
"Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living... Warrior, jailer, priest - the eternal trinity which symbolizes our fear of life." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our stupidity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas." - Henry Steele Commager
"All words are pegs to hangs ideas on." - Henry Ward Beecher
"When young men are beginning life, the most important period, it is often said, is that in which their habits are formed. That is a very important period. But the period in which the ideas of the young are formed and adopted is more important still. For the ideal with which you go forth to measure things determines the nature, so far as you are concerned, of everything you meet." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Only a few rare souls in a century, to whose class I make no pretension, count much in the great flow of this Republic. The life stream of this nation is the generations of millions of human particles acting under the impulses of advancing ideas and national ideals gathered from a thousand springs... We are but transitory officials in government whose duty is to keep these channels clear and to strengthen and extend these dikes. What counts toward the honor of public officials is that they sustain the national ideals upon which are patterned the design of these channels of progress and the construction of these dikes of safety." -
"In the heat of [social] movements brains are set stirring with new ideas which live on through quieter times, waiting for another opportunity to ignite into action and change the world around us." - Howard Zinn
"Poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and is least willing to be led by precepts or example) holds the first rank among all the arts. It expands the mind by giving freedom to the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with the given concept, to whose bounds it is restricted, that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate, and by thus rises aesthetically to ideas." - Immanuel Kant
"Metaphysics has for the real object of its investigation three ideas only: God, Freedom and Immortality." - Immanuel Kant
"Reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation that must form our judgment." - Isaac Watts
"Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things. This is one of the chief elements in what we vaguely call capacity. If you do not dare differ from your associates and teachers you will never be great or your life sublime. You may be the happier as a result, or you may be miserable. Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us." - James Harvey Robinson
"A soul occupied with great ideas best performs small duties." - James Martineau
"Quotations distill ideas down to their essence." - Jan Phillips
"Duty is the grandest of ideas, because it implies the idea of God, of the soul, of liberty, of responsibility, of immortality." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"The word “independence” is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word “dependence” is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption." - Jeremy Bentham
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
"The problem in those people who formed their ideas in the 1940's and the 1950's and have never changed them as the world changed. There is something wrong with people who make up their minds and don't change them." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"The enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas." - John Maynard Keynes
"On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony." - John Muir
"Art is greatest, which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas, and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received." - John Ruskin
"[Economic] and social changes, though among the greatest, are not the only forces which shape the course of our species. Ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances: they are themselves a power in history." - John Stuart Mill
"Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them." - John Stuart Mill
"Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming... We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by means of ideas." - José Ortega y Gasset
"From social intercourse are derived some of the highest enjoyments of life; where there is a free interchange of sentiments the mind acquires new ideas, and by frequent exercise of its powers, the understanding gains fresh vigor." - Joseph Addison
"The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas, as those of a fool are by his passions. The time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts; or, in other words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it." - Joseph Addison
"The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas." - Joseph Addison
"The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated." - Joseph Campbell
"To the liberal ideas of the age must be opposed the moral ideas of all ages." - Joseph Joubert
"It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is impossible." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. Every great discover contains an irrational element or a creative intuition." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." - Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
"Men become susceptible to ideas, not by discussion and argument, but by seeing them personified and by loving the person who embodies them." - Lewis Mumford
"What we need is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world." - Marsilio Ficino
"There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather." - Martin Luther
"Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretive both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity." - Matthew Arnold
"Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion." - Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
"We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness." - Maxwell Maltz
"Education takes place in the whole community. It is in the malls, the highways, the media, and their parents’ lifestyles that give young people their clearest ideas of what reality is about" - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály