Ideas

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.
~ William Bernbach, in The New York Times (6 October 1982).

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.
~ William Bernbach, in Quotable Business (1992).

The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.
~ William Henry (W.H.) Beveridge

I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.
~ Billy Bishop

Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake (1863). Notes on Reynolds' Discourses (written c. 1798-1808; aka Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds).

We are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement, "It can't be done."
~ William E. Boeing

When you get an idea don't run off into the woods with it lest somebody take it away from you. Put it on the anvil and bid the world hit it with the heaviest sledge. Give all dissenters an opportunity to try it with fire. It is the truth we want, and truth is indestructible.
~ William Cowper Brann, from The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast, Vol. III (1919). A Wayside Sermon

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 [First Amendment] guaranties, unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests.
~ William Joseph Brennan, Jr. (majority opinion), Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 484 (1957).

In sum, just as access to ideas makes it possible for citizens generally to exercise their rights of free speech and press in a meaningful manner, such access prepares students for active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society in which they will soon be adult members.
~ William Joseph Brennan, Jr. (concurring opinion), Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982).

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
~ Percy Williams (P.W.) Bridgman, The Intelligent Individual and Society (1938).

There are no ideas in things.
~ William Bronk, in Sagetrieb 7.3 (Winter 1988). A Conversation with William Bronk

Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr., in National Review (19 November 1955). Publishers Statement

[Ideas] are the mightiest influences on earth. One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), On The Elevation of The Labouring Classes (1840). Lecture I

Ideas are the most mysterious things in a mysterious world . . . They are beyond prediction. They appear to have a life of their own, independent of space and time, and to come and go at their own pleasure . . . Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.
~ William (W.) MacNeile Dixon, The Human Situation (1937).

Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.
~ William Orville Douglas, An Almanac of Liberty (1954).

If a clever man can figure out how to hold up a cow by its ears, even a moron can milk it.
~ William Crapo ("Billy") Durant

Almost any idea is good if a man has ability and is willing to work hard. The best idea is worthless if the creator is a loafer and ineffective.
~ William Feather

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

I think a lot of people have good ideas and dismiss them. They assume that if they really had a good idea, someone else would have already thought of it first. . . . But if you have an idea and you want to succeed with it, in business or science or anything else, you have to be persistent. You have to believe in yourself.
~ William H. Frey II, Washington University in St. Louis Magazine (Summer 2001). Treating Alzheimer's: A Researcher's Dream

And it came out of just spitballing ideas.
~ William Friedkin, The Harold Lloyd Master Seminar Series at the American Film Institute (16 March 1994).

The informing idea of what you want to say and do, that's what will take you from film school to professional -- the idea. That's what is original to you.
~ William Friedkin, The Harold Lloyd Master Seminar Series at the American Film Institute (16 March 1994).

If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?
~ Bill Gates

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made that intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps.
~ Stephen William Hawking, Quoted in Webster's Electronic Quotebase (1994).

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821). Introduction

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
~ William James

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre.
~ William James, in Philosophical Review (1908). The Pragmatist Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
~ William James, from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
~ William James

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not.
~ William James, from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
~ William James, from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

If he ever had a bright idea, it would be beginner's luck.
~ William Lashner, Veritas (1997).

What you need is an idea.
~ William Powell Lear

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.
~ William Lippmann

There are few minds in a century that can look upon a new idea without terror. Fortunately for the rest of us there are very few new ideas about.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer's Notebook (1949). 1896 entry

No directions came with this idea.
~ William Maxwell

A man must let his ideas grow, not be continually rooting them up to see how they are getting on.
~ William McFee

Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it might sound at first.
~ William McKnight

One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.
~ William Morris, Art Under Plutocracy (1883).

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
~ Bill Moyers, in Time Magazine (29 October 1965).

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen and chariots.
~ William M. Paxton

Great ideas come when the world needs them.
~ William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps

[T]he denial of access to ideas inhibits one's own acquisition of knowledge only when that denial is relatively complete. If the denied ideas are readily available from the same source in other accessible locations, the benefits to be gained from exposure to those ideas have not been foreclosed by the State.
~ William H. Rehnquist (dissenting opinion), Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982).

Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.
~ William Irwin Thompson

People don't resist their own ideas.
~ William Werther, in Nation's Business (March 1988).

Fundamental ideas are not a consequence of experience, but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.
~ William Whewell

No ideas but in things.
~ William Carlos Williams, from Selected Poems (1948). A Sort of Song (written in 1944)

When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.
~ Marianne Williamson

Think for thyself one good idea, but known to be thine own, is better than a thousand gleaned from fields by others sown.
~ Alexander Wilson

If an idea cannot be expressed in terms of people, it is a sure sign it is irrelevant to the real problem of life.
~ Colin Henry Wilson, in Declaration (1958).