We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
Ideas
Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.
Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
We are afraid of ideas, of experimenting, of change. We shrink from thinking a problem through to a logical conclusion.
Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.
Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down – like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War.
Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.
For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.