Quotes about Ideas

Here's the next section of quotes from my book 1000 Great Quotations for Business, Management & Training

If you want to have a great idea, have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling, US chemist, double Nobel Prize winner (1901-1994)

Linus Pauling

 If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.

Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist, businessman (1833-1896)

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Albert Einstein, German physicist (1879-1955)

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Edward de Bono, Maltese psychologist, author (b. 1933)

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

Elbert Hubbard, US publisher, editor (1856-1915)

Daring ideas are like chessmen moving forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, letter-writer (1749-1832)

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

Ursula K Le Guin, US author (b. 1929)

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

Sean O’Casey, Irish dramatist, nationalist (1880-1964)

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.

Charles Brown, US explorer, adventurer (1863-1945)

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.

Ken Hakuta, US-Japanese entrepreneur (b. 1950)

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

Franklin D Roosevelt, US President (1882-1945)

Ideas are the raw materials of progress. Everything first takes shape in the form of an idea. But an idea by itself is worth nothing. An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.

Bertie Charles Forbes, British journalist, founder of Forbes Magazine (1880-1954)

The barriers to innovation in many companies are social as much as they are organisational; whole categories of people are ignored as sources of ideas.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, US academic, management author (b. 1943)

If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person.

Ralph Bunche, US diplomat (1904-1971)

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

John F Kennedy, US President (1917-1963)

Between the idea

and the reality

falls the shadow.

T S Eliot, US/British poet, dramatist, critic (1888-1965)