Ideas Quotes - Page 425

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.

Sun Tzu's ideas as expressed above had a profound effect on Ho Chi Minh, who sought to defeat both the French and the Americans without recourse to violence - or at least to conventional battle tactics.

Many of the ideas of Sun Tzu and Mao Zedong came naturally to the young Ho Chi Minh, who would probably have applied the same strategy even had he not been aware of them.

On many occasions in the late 1950s and 1960s, [Ho Chi Minh's] ideas were apparently ignored by those who felt that his approach was too naive and prone to compromise. The outbreak of open warfare with the French and later with the United States was in effect a sign of the failure of Ho Chi Minh to achieve his objective to fight and win at low cost.

From the outset, when [Ho Chi Minh] became a member of the French Communist Party in 1920, he was an independent thinker who adjusted Marxist-Leninist ideas and tactics to what he perceived to be the concrete situation in Indochina.

We [United States] are the only military superpower. We have no idea how long this is going to last, so we ought to get every bad guy we can and fix every problem we can.

When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

When we put aside partisanship, embrace the best ideas regardless of where they come from and work for principled compromise, we can move America not left or right, but forward.

True Excellence requires a worthy dream, a good Idea of how to realize it and the courage to risk failure to achieve it.

The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

It was inevitable the Titanic was going to set sail, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea to be on it.

There are a lot of ideas I've had that I originally was quite taken with, but over time, I lost steam. They stay on my list, but between me and you, I'm probably never going to do them.

When I write, I love finding connections between ideas. When the connections are plentiful and strong, then I know it's a pretty good subject to write about.

I get some of my best ideas while out walking.

Democracy is held captive, not just by money, but by ideas - the ideas that money buys.

Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man.

I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism.

There's an idea called "gray man", in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure.

People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.

The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote.

We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?

Faith always presented to the mind the idea of an abnormal intellectual condition, of the subversion or suspension of the critical faculties. It sometimes comprised more than this, but it always included this. It was the opposite of doubt and of the spirit of doubt. What irreverent men called credulity, reverent men called faith; and although one word was more respectful than the other, yet the two words were with most men strictly synonymous.