Ideas Quotes - Page 491

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the audience have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.

Television is a non graded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away wtih the idea of sequenece and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.

The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods. and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.

I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.

I have actual strong ideas. You just have to wait for the right timing. Timing is pretty crucial here. I can't dedicate a lot of energy and efforts trying to, say, create a show that I want to produce while I'm currently on another show.

I take notice of those who have argued consistently for the modernisation of the E.U., but so many of the skeptics in Britain are just hostile to the whole European idea.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know.

"Ocean" is more about ... powerlessness and hopelessness. When we're very small we can't actually do anything - we have no say in what happens, we have no money or resources, we sometimes have no idea what's going on.

People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick.

I love making things. I love building things. I love the idea that something's in the world that wasn't there before.

I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.

Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.

The truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.

I had so many ideas that I wanted to get out at once that it led to simple little drawings and paintings.

A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it."

This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology.

Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct.

The idea that God resides in the unknown is what philosophers call the God of the gaps. And we have this thing called science, which marches on and makes discoveries in those gaps, ultimately closing gaps.

I don't want to repeat myself. I hate the idea of coasting and of recycling the same ideas. Then, you're just subject to the law of diminishing returns.