“A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.”
“Poems are mummified ideas”
“Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”
“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.”
“Ideas are easy. It s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”
“Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.”
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they re amiable and sometimes not.”
“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
“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.”
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one s idea for thirty-five years; there s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”
“If you haven t found it yet, keep looking. Don t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”
“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”
“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”