For most of human history people owned other people. Then, only a hundred and fifty years ago, our ancestors figured out that was a bad idea. One day we’ll figure out, or our descendants will figure out, that people owning land they don’t live on...
If two parties with two sets of bad ideas cooperate, the result is not good policy, but policy that is extremely bad. What we really need are correct economic and politcal ideas, regardless of the party that pushes them.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I ca...
Just in case you get any ideas, know that I’ll be sleeping with a can of Mace in one hand and pepper spray in the other.” - Katie Jorlan's expression turned mocking. “Just in case you get any ideas, know that I’ll be sleeping with a feather i...
best practices are useful reference points, but they must come with a warning label : The more you rely on external intelligence, the less you will value an internal idea. And this is the age of the idea
Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.
We have entered a time when a writer's first idea is his best idea, when the first thing a reporter hears is the first thing that she reports. We live in a time now when we have seen major television networks take video off of YouTube and broadcast i...
To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?
A brilliant idea is like a baby in a mothers womb. You need to bring it out in the world, nurture it, feed it, grow it, till it becomes big enough to take care of itself. If you leave it at the stage of an idea itself, it is as good as non existent.
We walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot ( said and proved that could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by...
No-one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and...
Uninformed, America may succumb to bad ideas and leaders. In succumbing, we fail to fulfill our destiny. Well informed, America rises as far as the good ideas and leaders it proactively chooses. In so rising, we fulfill our destiny and offer to the w...
He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful ...
I'd like to see fashion slow down a bit. What freaks me out about fashion today is the speed - the speed of consuming, the speed of ideas. When fashion moves so fast, it takes away something I always loved, which is the idea that fashion should be sl...
The ideas I'm working with are ideas I'm committed to. I don't know how to soft-shoe them. I don't know how to make them more palpable. I just never knew how to be one of those girls. I wish I knew how to be that sometimes, but I don't know how to be...
We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather in...
Every one says: 'Listen, I'd love to reinvest. I'd love to hire people. But I have no idea what this healthcare bill is going to do to my bottom line. I have no idea what this financial reform bill is going to do... I'm not going to step out a limb a...
The ripple that travels across water does not begin on its own. In order to create positive change one must act upon the intention. Creating a new idea is simple, but is just the beginning. Manifesting an idea into our perceived reality, the physical...
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out...
