Cool Quotes - I

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Society's course will be changed only by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

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

The communication of ideas requires a similitude of thought and language . . .

Great ideas often look identical to stupid ones right up until the moment they work.

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!

I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.

An idle mind is the devil's workshop.

Be not solitary, be not idle.

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.

[It] is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.

Anxiety, n. The first time you can't do it a second time.

Panic, n. The second time you can't do it the first time.

"Has it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?"

"Yes, sir, it has."

"Then why do you do it?"

"To assuage my fears of sexual impotence."

[The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands . . .

[Laurence J. Peter] has devoted his life to discovering remedies for incompetence . . .

If you don't find it in the Index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.

India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Men of intemperate mind never can be free; their passions forge their fetters.

The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.

Don't interrupt me when I'm interrupting!

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

The Irish people do not gladly suffer common sense.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.