Radical Ideas Quotes

Have you ever thought that radical ideas threaten institutions, then become institutions, and in turn reject radical ideas which threaten institutions? ~ Saul Bass

Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. Revenge is an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What has happened over the ensuing two millennia is that we who confess Christ have deftly (and mostly unconsciously) crafted a religion that neatly separates the Jesus who died on the cross for the radical ideas he preached - ideas that Jesus foresaw would lead to his crucifixion. ~ Brian Zahnd

People don't want to think ... I mean, they don't! They just want to say, 'Oh, okay, feminists are humorless man-haters,' and that's simply not the case. There are radical people and radical ideas in absolutely every movement, but that doesn't mean they define the ideals. ~ Roxane Gay

I think about Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing.' What a radical idea that sex was healing. I learned my politics through that music. ~ Eve Ensler

Let him hurl these pieces of toast like new and radical ideas that must be cast into the world. Pieces of toast like angry children who will hit us and upset us and change our ways of thinking and feeling. ~ Donald Antrim

Innovation is the result of a process that brings radical ideas to create positive change ~ Natasha Tsakos

In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded. ~ Tom Robbins

We can have paid family and medical leave. We can make public colleges and universities tuition-free. These are not revolutionary, radical ideas. They're kind of common sense. ~ Bernie Sanders

Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't. ~ Bruce Feiler

I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas. ~ Dennis Gabor

Because having your story told, as a woman, as a person of color, as a lesbian or as a trans person, or as any member of any disenfranchised community ... is sadly often still a radical idea. There is so much power in storytelling and there is enormous power in inclusive storytelling and inclusive representations . ~ Kerry Washington

Democracy is still a radical idea in a world where we often confuse images with realities, words with actions. ~ Hillary Clinton

What does impress both the unsaved and saved alike are those rare individuals who have learned to control their lifestyles and use the abundance they have to help others and spread God's Word. ... Let me propose a radical idea from God's Word: Determine God's best for your life, and be satisfied with it, even if it means moving down in lifestyle. ~ Larry Burkett

Acquire the courage to believe in yourself. Many of the things that you have been taught were at one time the radical ideas of individuals who had the courage to believe what their own hearts and minds told them was true, rather than accept the common beliefs of their day. ~ Chin-Ning Chu

Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition ... well, they are still radical ideas. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The new radical ideas will soon be the old radical ideas. ~ Marty Rubin

Leadership has to be focused on some very radical ideas that only we as 21st Century people can talk about: making sure people have a livelihood, making sure people receive a living wage, making sure the environment, the Mother Earth, is embraced and cherished and not destroyed. Making sure people are healthy in what they eat, making sure we hold people and corporations accountable for the damage they do not only to our environment but to our institutions. ~ Danny Glover

The revolution that's required isn't a revolution of radical ideas, but the implementation of ideas we already have. ~ Russell Brand

When a group of ultra-opinionated, uber-creative romance authors get together, I'm sure you guys can imagine how fast the ideas start flying! ~ Teresa Medeiros

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed. ~ Tom Piazza

I think the corruption of power is very interesting, and I think the idea that power is something that ... You know, when people want power, they're a certain individual. When people acquire power by accident, they're different again. ~ David Morrissey

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas. ~ Edmund Wilson

We need a way to supply the camp," Chiron said. "Any ideas?"
"Yes! We take what we need by force!" bellowed the leader of the Ares cabin.
"Or we could just, you know, steal it," suggested the Hermes representative.
"No, no!" The son of Apollo whipped out his lyre. "We should sing for our supper, as did the minstrels of yore!"
"Of your what?" asked the Dionysus counselor."
"What?"
"'The minstrels of your'", the Dionysus girl said impatiently. "Of your what?"
A representative of the visiting Hunters intervened. "Not your. Yore."
The Dionysus girl gave up. ~ Rick Riordan

My confidence allows me to do things my way and help people make a decision. People like the idea of me just being me. ~ Curtis Jackson

I actually dream a lot of songs, and I try to be good about voice-memoing ideas. ~ Ted Leo

The idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something I can't understand or subscribe to. ~ Natalie Jeremijenko

I always liked the idea of the guitar - because cowboys played the guitar. ~ Tom Petty

Smite," she asked softly, "do you have any idea what to say to me in a situation like this?"
"Of course I do," he retorted. "I have plenty of ideas." He met her gaze ruefully. "Of course, they're all wrong, and so I'm totally at sea."
She patted the cushion next to her. He crossed the room and lowered himself down. And then, because he didn't seem inclined to do it himself, she picked up his hand and slid it around her shoulders. ~ Courtney Milan

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister. ~ Sigmund Freud

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

So is he a radical?" non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. "Not at all," I'd say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. "Of course not."

And I'd meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical.

His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He's an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularised by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram's call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l'Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam's point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. "Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else."

All the time spent fulminating, organising, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run ~ Carla Power

It wasn't enough to catch a glimpse of these lands and ideas through the small window of the pages she turned. She wanted to step through and feel the yellow waters of the Yangtze herself, to hear the celestial music of foreign pipes, to taste the foods described by adventurers who traveled purposefully into the areas on maps labeled 'Here be tygres. ~ Liz Braswell

Getting up way in advance of dawn is always a good idea. Nearly ninety-nine percent of the time when I have gotten up in the middle of the night for a shoot, something good always presents itself to offset the nagging tiredness and discomfort of losing sleep. ~ Peter Menzel

The idea that a film is created in the editing room - it's only a certain kind of movie that's made in the editing room and it's not one that I really want to see. ~ Ethan Hawke

Scenius." Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an "ecology of talent. ~ Austin Kleon

But the idea of using the Apache resistance, one, it works effective to actually get German soldiers to think of Jews that way. You know, and they're not just any Jews. They're the American Jews. They're Jews with entitlement. ~ Quentin Tarantino

They will do more whether we do what we're doing or whether we don't do what we're doing. And the idea that you could appease them [terrorists] by stopping doing what we're doing or some implication that by doing what we're doing we're inciting them to attack us is just utter nonsense. It's just
it's kind of like feeding an alligator, hoping it eats you last. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

[Donald Trump] suggestions that the United States should leave the Pacific and let Japan, South Korea, or whoever else wants to develop nuclear weapons. These are incredibly dangerous ideas that need to be confronted. ~ Hillary Clinton

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise
as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. ~ Allan Bloom

And these open vortexes in the sonorous world finally form one sole vortex in which the ideas fit in with one another. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Broadly conceived, however, ecology deals with the balance of nature. Inasmuch as nature includes man, the science basically deals with the harmonization of nature and man. This focus has explosive implications. The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only from the fact that ecology is intrinsically a critical science--in fact, critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy failed to attain--but it is also an integrative and reconstructive science. ~ Murray Bookchin

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows: A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to. ~ Sinclair Lewis

It struck me that in every family, culture, or religion, ideas of right and wrong are the hot cattle prods, the barking sheepdogs that keep the masses in the herd. They are the bars that keep us caged. I decided that if I kept doing the "right" thing, I would spend my life following someone else's directions instead of my own. I didn't want to live my life without living my life. I wanted to make my own decision as a free woman, from my soul, not my training. But the problem was, I didn't know how. ~ Glennon Doyle

Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward. ~ Ben Eine

When you cast doubt on some bodily function- you don't know how sensitive the body is to that kind of idea. ~ Ina May Gaskin

The ideas that we have about self are an aggregate within a state of mind, and they chain us to a state of mind. ~ Frederick Lenz

The sight of parents, children and grandparents all descending on a tented field to enjoy the pleasure of ideas and books renews my faith in humanity. ~ Mariella Frostrup

To hell with ideas - if people always did what, on careful consideration, was in their most selfish interest, there would be nothing with the world, there would be nothing wrong with the world. Who wants to die and starve? Nobody. If people weren't driven crazy by ideas and their God, nobody would, for instance, go to war in order to starve and to die a beastly death. ~ Bela Zsolt

That's why I love talking and teaching: the act of reproducing ideas out loud reinforces them in the head. If, every time you read a complex book or idea, you had to explain it to someone else, you'd never forget it. ~ Stephen Fry

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists , and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track. ~ Ronald Fisher

I haven't got the time to sit here arguing with someone whose idea of a coherent foreign policy is what comes up in Google when you type in peace! ~ Tony Blair

Verbal jujitsu is the intentional use of language to yield in a verbal confrontation with a potential attacker, while using the language of the opponent to blend with the opponent, thereby neutralizing their words, and causing them to yield or share your thoughts/ideas. ~ Kambiz Mostofizadeh

On the flip side, no one has any idea who the hell I am. I felt like I had to prove myself to them. On any new project I'm working on, the first week is nerve-wracking, but especially with these people that I admire so much and who I just want to be equal with. ~ Dave Franco

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology. ~ Stanislav Grof

The idea of discussing psychological and philosophical ideas in a visual medium was really exciting to me. I thought I was going to go into philosophy ... and suddenly I found this way to combine that with my love for visual mediums. ~ Andrew Neel

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid? ~ John Archibald Wheeler

Nothing great happens without a great idea. ~ Debasish Mridha

Those who have chosen the path of least resistance in life, who cannot bear to bring themselves to make a stern value-judgment in criticism of their own most intimate feelings, achieve what they deserve: not self-understanding but radical self-superficialization, not a discovered but a self-ascribed identity that explains nothing, reveals nothing, means nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing culturally or intellectually. ~ Kenny Smith

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

We never know how much one loves till we know how much he is willing to endure and suffer for us; and it is the suffering element that measures love. The characters that are great must, of necessity, be characters that shall be willing, patient and strong to endure for others. To hold our nature in the willing service of another is the divine idea of manhood, of the human character. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I have very intense conversations with friends, people I really interconnect with. We talk about politics, important things. I like to talk about ideas and get people to be specific. ~ Jacqueline Bisset

My idea of a vacation is to rest quietly in the shade of a blond. ~ Dick Powell

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Your views of God and self are not small ideas of little consequence. ~ Joe Thorn