Ideas Quotes - Page 340

The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch.

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen or chariots.

God has so framed us as to make freedom of choice and action the very basis of all moral improvement, and all our faculties, mental and moral, resent and revolt against the idea of coercion.

Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

Truth happens to an idea

Ho Chi Minh rarely wrote about Sun Tzu, but when he did mention the ancient Chinese military strategist, he was always laudatory, and he sometimes cited his ideas as a model for the Vietnamese revolutionary movement to follow.

I would hazard the statement that in the broad sense [Ho Chi Minh's] ideas had triumphed, since the communist victory in Vietnam was a consequence of political, diplomatic, and psychological factors more than military ones. That is a tribute to the ideas that he introduced in his life and thought.

All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].

One problem with ideas, however valid, is that they are static and impersonal, whereas a person is active and dynamic.

The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to the modern idea of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets.

A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.

The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference; it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

An idea isn't worth much until a man is found who has the energy and ability to make it work.

With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.

Soul Gathers Force It is possible, when the future is dim, when our depressed faculties can form no bright ideas of the perfection and happiness of a better world,-it is possible still to cling to the conviction of God's merciful purpose towards His creatures, of His parental goodness even in suffering, still to feel that the path of duty, though trodden with a heavy heart, leads to peace.

Very much of what we call the progress of today consists in getting rid of false ideas, false conceptions of things, and in taking a point of view that enables us to see the principles, ideas and things in right relation to each other.

Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.

I think that's the direction we [the americans] are going to have to go, the idea of people understanding that if you see something, say something, as simple as it sounds.

I have no idea what my limits are. I believe that if I set my mind to it, within the next fifteen years, I would be the President of the United States.

If somebody asks me about the themes of something I'm working on, I never have any idea what the themes are. . . . Somebody tells me the themes later. I sort of try to avoid developing themes. I want to just keep it a little bit more abstract. But then, what ends up happening is, they say, 'Well, I see a lot here that you did before, and it's connected to this other movie you did,' and . . . that almost seems like something I don't quite choose. It chooses me.

It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world

The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country - or, for that matter, a region - to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people's ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?